


Prince of rain

by throwmetomorrow



Series: Shame!mcfassy AU [1]
Category: Shame (2011)
Genre: Angst, Bathing/Washing, Cats, Codependence, Community: mcfassy, Hamsters, Loneliness, M/M, New York City, Sex Addiction, Silence, Veterinarians, angst with fluffy moments, baths rule the world, behavior disorders, recovering from a heartbreak, single and unhappy, songs about rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-13 20:15:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 89,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2163768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throwmetomorrow/pseuds/throwmetomorrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jamie Marshall is a thirty-year old New York veterinarian. He’s single, he loves his job, and since three years he’s been in the “relationship recovery mode”, much to his many friends’ dismay. One evening, on his way back from a club, he experienced something which felt like a life-changing encounter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Have you ever seen the rain

**Author's Note:**

> This is a multichapter fanfic to the movie Shame starring Michael Fassbender. It is essentially set after the movie, but it also inserts some alteratons to the final part of the film.
> 
> My intention is to make this story work on as many levels as possible. It’s obviously targeted mainly at the cherik/ mcfassy fandom, but all kinds of readers are welcomed, including those who haven’t seen the original movie (the protagonist, Brandon, has been depicted in my story through my character’s eyes, so you learn everything from scratch anyway).
> 
> Rating: NC-17 for explicit sexual content and some disturbing themes (most chapters should be around R, actually)
> 
> Warnings: angst; OC-protagonist; spoilers for the movie Shame
> 
> Special thanks to my role-play Brandon, the author of everything Brandon says and does outside the movie script, and the unquestionable king of all Fassy incarnations and all things Fassy in this relationship.
> 
> EDIT: look, we've made an ask blog for _Prince of rain_! Now you can ask Brandon or Jamie (or both) anything you like!  
>  (Seriously, having an opportunity to ask Brandon a question and being sure it won't be left unanswered? Isn't that exciting? You can't imagine how Jamie envies you!)  
> http://noshametoask.tumblr.com/
> 
> EDIT: you can also watch a video about Brandon and Jamie (Brian from Starter for 10 starring as Jamie). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdB1wt-FJu4  
> Or this one (Nicholas Garrigan from The Last King of Scotland as Jamie).  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGhcXJ-tU8w

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jamie's friends are out on a hopeless quest to find him a new love of his life, or at least a random guy he can cuddle with every now and then. Every few weeks Jamie goes with them to a club, avoiding any hints of flirt with all his might, and hoping his friends will finally give it up. This night, however, on his early way back from the club Jamie meets a beaten-up and desperate Brandon, and somehow he ends up taking him home.

It was a rather untypical Thursday night for Jamie Marshall, the self-proclaimed busiest veterinarian in the whole New York city. Or maybe it was the district. Or just the clinic he was employed at. Or whatever, the point was he was a busy person, and he wouldn’t normally be the one to interrupt his very hectic cycle of shift-rest-sleep-shift, and instead go waltzing into gay clubs looking for an exciting one-night stand, or maybe for prospects of a promising romance. 

He didn’t even like to dance so much anymore. Hell, even talking to his friends wasn’t that much fun anymore if he did it with a drink over a club counter instead of enjoying a cup of coffee by the table at someone’s place. Could it be Jamie was getting old? 

And to think he used to think that thirty would be only a beginning.

But sometimes, about once a month or so, his friends – gay and hetero, singles and couples alike – would become just a little too much for him. All this texting, the phone calls, the e-mails. All the jabbing and nagging, all the soliciting, pleading and threatening. 

“Come on Jamie, let’s go out, let’s have fun!” 

“What do you mean you don’t have the time? Like, no time to relax? Or no time to take care of your personal life?” (“My personal life is perfectly fine, thank you”, reckoned Jamie upon hearing such lines.)

“Jamie, I’m so sorry to say this, but you’ve become such a no-life.” (“I’m kind of sure my cats and hamsters don’t share your opinion, but thanks anyway”.)

(About his cats having suddenly developed anxiety attacks when left alone all night.) “You’re a terrible liar.” 

(About his cats trying to hunt his hamsters down due to the anxiety attacks they underwent when left alone all night.) “Can’t you just lock the cats away from the bedroom?”

“Jamie, but seriously… Just one evening, just give it a try. If you don’t like it, then that’s okay, but what if you do? Why’d you miss out on your chances?” 

“Come on, man, how long it’s been? Five years?... Oh, three, sorry… Anyways, don’t you think it’s time to move on? No really, quit being a drama queen.”

_I hate it when they call me a drama queen_ , Jamie would think as he hung up the telephone. _I’d rather be called… I don’t know, how about a ‘prince of rain’?_ , he decided as the calm, wistful tunes of a Roxette song drifted from the radio straight to his ears.

_There’s a time for the good in life_  
_A time to kill the pain in life  
_ _Dream about the sun, you queen of rain_

Well, his friends were right about one thing. It always was some kind of fun, even though judging from their reactions, their idea of fun might have been something slightly different from his. The routine would repeat itself on most occasions. A guy (admittedly quite good-looking one) would sit beside Jamie and offer him a drink. Jamie would accept it, but at the same time frankly warn him that he was there just to hang out with his friends, so please, dear tall dark and handsome stranger, don’t take it the wrong way if I’m all nice and smiling and looking all endearing with my deep blue eyes screaming ‘I so need a man, please treat me right and I’ll be all yours’. Then the friends would cut in on Jamie, saying something along the lines of “no, don’t listen to him, he’s totally free and out for you to take him, he’s just being shy”. Jamie would then smile and say that no he was not, actually he was recovering from a relationship. The confused tall dark and handsome one then would stutter some polite expressions of sympathy and leave without getting Jamie that drink after all, while Jamie’s friends would cover their faces with their hands, mumbling something about five years of recovery, or whatever.

So yes, after all this was a fun night, too, and the most fun part was Jamie proving his point to his folks that trying to set him up with any willing, decent-looking random guy from a nightclub was purely a waste of time and efforts. 

Jamie was just about to leave the club, obviously as the first one from the pack. It was barely half past ten. He’d spent about two hours with his friends and actually he did enjoy it. Although if it hadn’t been for that whole setting of ‘let’s find Jamie a man and make him live his life like any healthy thirty-year-old should’, it would have been much nicer. But then again, maybe not as funny.

As Jamie went past the dark rooms and along the corridor to reach the exit, something, or someone, bumped into him with almost enough impact to knock Jamie over. Trying his best to keep his balance, a slightly amused Jamie thought to himself that this guy truly was one extreme case of a post-blow job daze, falling to the floor like that so helplessly right after he’d left a dark room. Whoever he was there with, the other one must have been good.

The guy who ran into him, however, didn’t seem to share Jamie’s joyful attitude about the event. Or really his joyful mood at all. He fell to his knees, and stayed like that for a couple of moments before he finally got up, all in slow-motion, hands shaking and legs unstable, sputtering an awkward apology from under the hood which was covering his face. 

This didn’t look amusing anymore.

“You all right?”, Jamie inquired hurriedly, putting his hand above the man’s elbow to help him up. He discreetly sniffed the air around him, but all he could detect was the sour smell of sweat, and not a trace of alcohol. Instead of relief, Jamie felt a cold sting inside his head. If it wasn’t the alcohol, then it could have been something much uglier. Drugs, possibly.

Careful not to frighten him, Jamie peered under the stranger’s hood to check on his eyes. The pupils looked and acted normal, at least from what Jamie could tell in that dim red light of the corridor. The way they looked certainly did not explain why Jamie couldn’t catch his eyes. They kept starring ahead like they couldn’t see Jamie there, like they couldn’t see anything there, for that matter. Like it was a kind of intoxication, after all.

That was when the truth suddenly crawled into Jamie’s vision. After all he was a vet, so his eyes were unusually alert and perceptive of any kind of physical damage, regardless of the quality of the lighting or other conditions.

The man’s face was bruised all over. Not only that, the skin was torn in one place on his cheek and another at his temple. It seemed like a serious battering. What could that be? A jealous lover? Or a gay-unfriendly neighborhood? Jamie could feel a whirlpool of worry filling up his stomach at the possibilities. 

“Hey, you need somebody to see those.” He tried his softest, calmest tone, like was talking to a hurt, scared animal. At least this was what Jamie had the confidence that he was remotely good at.

The man wasn’t responsive, which didn’t surprise Jamie anymore. He breathed slowly and heavily. Yes, even his breathing was in slow-motion.

“Gotta go”, he muttered like he was in some kind of a trance. “I’ve gotta go”, he repeated as he trudged into the street. Jamie scurried beside him, although he was cautious to keep his distance. And Jamie did not watch his distance simply because he wanted to; it was a lesson he had learned from his patients. 

When you meet a distrustful creature, then if you’re too persistent and everything has to be about your display of affection and good will, all you will end up doing is inflicting more harm to that unfortunate soul. 

“Look at you, you can’t be going nowhere in this… condition”. Trying not to seem like a road salesman, Jamie prayed that the man could hear him in spite of his dissociated appearances. “I really think you should sit down for a minute… why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“Gotta go”, remained the man’s only reply. And then, in spite of his words, he unexpectedly stopped in the middle of the pavement, gasping for air like he was suddenly wounded in the chest.

Jamie couldn’t even see his face well, its expression or the way it exactly looked. And the tone of his voice also revealed little more than his stupor. But it didn’t matter. What Jamie was certain of was that this man was in such enormous pain, such silent, unstoppable torture that it broke Jamie’s heart. And all that he knew was that he couldn’t leave to his own devices this beaten, devastated man, possibly intoxicated and out of control, refusing to accept any help, right in the middle of this cold, indifferent city. 

It just didn’t seem right.

Who would be there to help that man if Jamie left him alone like that?

Slowly but decisively, Jamie stepped up to stand in front of the stranger.

“Would you please look at me?”, he issued his straightforward request, consequently trying to make an eye contact with the man. In the light shed by the street lamps, the stranger’s eyes looked icily bright and distant. He constantly seemed to be looking right through Jamie, like he wasn’t even there, like there was just the thick nighttime darkness spreading before him.

The man then lowered his blank stare, directing it at his own hands. He was looking at them all confused, with some sort of disbelief and a tint of despair. It really was a lonely and disturbing sight. 

That was when Jamie decided to move one step further, because the problem was too deep to keep holding back. By doing this, he risked he would go one step too far, but it still wouldn’t be any worse than letting the man go just like that. Now at least Jamie would have tried.

What he ventured into was physical contact. 

“Listen.” He took a light, concerned grip of the man’s shoulder, leaning a little bit towards him. He still wanted to leave him some margin in case the man decided this was unbearable and fled, but he did realize that in order to elicit any reaction from him, he had to be more aggressive. “Is there somebody you’d like me to call? Like, someone close you’d feel comfortable around right now?”

This approach turned out quite effective. Apparently moved at the mentioning of _someone close_ , the man quivered and looked up to meet Jamie’s face for the first time. Right now he seemed much more present.

“No, don’t call anyone. I’m good.” _You’re certainly not_ , thought Jamie, but he didn’t let it escape his mouth, as he was too much in awe at this relatively long and coherent utterance from his newly acquainted friend.

“I see”, that was Jamie’s reply instead. “Look… and oh, by the way, I’m Jamie…” he suspended his voice, but as it was clear that the man had no intention to reveal his own name in return, Jamie carried on with his plan. “Why don’t we sit down and talk? You could tell me then what happened. You see, I do want to help you, but it will be all for nothing if you don’t trust me.”

The man winced uneasily, hesitating for a while. Jamie guessed that this time it might have been the foreign sound of the word _trust_ that made him so apprehensive.

“Alright, but just a few seconds”, he drawled unenthusiastically. But Jamie was perfectly okay with that. The guy said yes, so they were finally on the way to help him. Such a relief.

“Sure, whatever you need”, he responded seriously and as respectfully as he could, trying to let the guy know how he appreciated that this decision to _trust_ Jamie must have cost him quite a lot. “Do you want to go to a bar or somewhere? I know a few nice places around… Or… or would you rather go somewhere private? I live two subway stations away, if you don’t like the audience.”

“I don’t like the audience”, the man answered curtly. Jamie received this statement with plenty of understanding. Discussing painful private issues wasn’t exactly suited for crowded, noisy places such as New York downtown bars in their evening rush hour.

But walking the stranger to the subway station, and thinking how unambiguously an offer of ‘going somewhere private’ made by a stranger in a gay club must have sounded like, Jamie gave it his all to stop flushing like a madman.


	2. Chasing waterfalls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jamie honestly wants to talk to Brandon and find out what his problem is. Brandon, on the other hand, is much more into doing (his problems) than talking (about them). Jamie has his doubts, but he's not exactly eager to say no. Initially Brandon gives him fantastic sex, but soon Jamie realizes all the pain and compulsion behind Brandon's frantic movements.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Special thanks to my role-play Brandon, the author of everything Brandon says and does outside the movie script, and the unquestionable king of all Fassy incarnations and all things Fassy in this relationship._

They traveled the way to Jamie’s apartment in an almost perfect silence. The man wouldn’t become any more easygoing, and Jamie figured it would perhaps be best, and most considerate on his part, if he shut up for a few minutes instead of trying to keep up the conversation with someone to whom even uttering single chunks of words apparently seemed like an excruciating effort. 

They even took in the opposite seats in the subway train, hardly ever looking at each other, like they were complete strangers… which they in fact were. 

Never interrupting the stillness around them, in some fifteen minutes they reached their destination. Jamie’s was a one-bedroom type apartment, located on the first floor of a modern seven-storey building. Its windows and balcony faced a relatively quiet back alley. Overall, it was a nice place for a reasonable renting price, and Jamie still enjoyed the benefits of living there, even with all the upsetting memories of his previous committed relationship – since it was Jamie who remained in the apartment after his partner had moved out – it would bring back every now and then. 

Jamie opened the door and let the man in first, asking him to proceed to the living room and make himself comfortable. His guest limped ahead and ended up on Jamie’s sofa, ignoring in a disinterested manner the new environment he found himself in. On the other hand, Jamie found himself stuck by the entrance with his two cats, Pleakley and Jumba, demanding their affectionate welcome ceremony. (Jamie called them by their names, by the way, but the man remained unaffected. Apparently he didn’t get the reference. Not that he could be expected to be a Disney animated features fan, which made Jamie feel honestly sorry for him.) 

Once the felines were satisfied with their ‘our human’s back’ petting ritual, Jumba moved to the kitchen annex venturing for more cat food to supply his already rather obese body. Or maybe he was just hoping that Jamie, the way he always did as soon as he came back home, would open the fridge to get himself some dinner, making it Jumba’s chance for extra human snack that night, too. No luck this time, though. His owner was too busy worrying about this strange, smelly primate he’d just brought in as his trophy from his territory round.

If Jumba was the gourmand one, then Pleakley was the spoiled sentimental one. Jamie had always suspected his lovely pet would literally sell his soul for one more stroke or ear scratch from any available volunteer, and Pleakley did confirm the assumption now as he stubbornly rubbed against the stranger’s legs in heartfelt attempts to attract his attention. As for Jamie’s guest, not only did he manage to stay indifferent to Pleakley’s advances, he also kept pushing the poor creature away, resolutely grabbing him and putting him aside every time Pleakley approached him, gently but coldly.

A dedicated cat-lover, all his life Jamie felt sympathy embellished with scorn towards people who were put off by cats, or animals in general. With this man, however, it seemed somewhat different. It was less like he was disgusted by Jamie’s pet and more like he was scared of him, scared of being intruded upon. All it did was magnify Jamie’s concern. 

It was no use to expose to a cat’s caresses someone who found their touch disturbing, so Jamie shushed Pleakley out of the couch and into the kitchen to go and play with Jumba.

“Would you like something to drink?”, he targeted then an inquiry to his guest in a mild tone, seating himself on the chair beside the sofa.

Still with his hood on, as if ashamed of revealing his face, the man seemed strangely surprised at Jamie’s offer.

“No… no”, he answered in a hoarse voice, followed by another spell of thick silence. 

Jamie took a deep breath, for a moment fixing his gaze upon his guest’s hands. Those were a pair of beautifully shaped palms with incredibly long, lean fingers. They had a certain sternness to them, as well as frailty. Jamie brushed aside a strand of wavy dark hair from his forehead and swallowed uneasily at this breathtaking work of nature that were the hands of that man. 

Then, finally, he pulled himself together enough to lift his gaze again to the stranger’s hood-covered face. He got back to the topic that brought them there.

“So… do you think you can tell me now what happened?”

But the man apparently didn’t.

Instead, with those trademark slow-motion movements, he began to take off his jacket. A white undershirt fitted tightly to his torso, which was quite muscular, although slender. Jamie stared into it until he found the courage to look up and for the first time discover the man’s now-revealed face. 

He was such a beautiful guy. Even with those bruises and scratches, with those dark rings around his eyes, and his rough skin grey with exhaustion: none of those mattered. He had this raw but mysterious way about him, contradicting as it may have seemed. His cheeks were sunken, his complexion ash-pale, like he was suffering from some debilitating condition, but even this couldn’t deny the grace of his looks, the exquisiteness of this chiseled face, of those symmetrical features so firm, and yet so vulnerable. There was something extraordinary about this face. About its angular shape, broad forehead, fine nose and strong jawline. Something compelling, but at the same time, intimidating. 

Up until this moment, Jamie had had this vague feeling like he was standing right on the edge of something unknown, something exciting and maybe a little bit scary. But right now he found himself pushed off the cliff and dragged into the stranger’s ominously lonely world, now that the stranger leant towards Jamie to kiss him.

 _This isn’t what we came here for_ , Jamie could hear his muffled inner voice struggling to get through to him from under the chaos of his physical responses. He intended to help the guy, rather than indulge in his own fantasies of giving consolation sex to an attractive stranger. The man clearly was in deep trouble, and if he wanted to solve his problems by sexual acting out – fine, but why should it be Jamie of all people to lend him a hand and become a part of his escapist schemes? Then again, the taste of the man’s lips was too strong, the sensation of their ripe, stylish bitterness with the promise of red hot passion boiling underneath their skin too overwhelming for Jamie to care. That’s why his inner voice was muffled in first place.

Somehow he forced himself to pull away for air, breathing way too heavily for just this one kiss that they shared.

He put his lips beneath the man’s ear.

“Are you sure this is going to help you?”, he asked the most unconvincing question ever. And understandably, the man even didn’t bother to answer Jamie. Instead, he pulled him closer and renewed his kiss, now much more aggressively with his tongue tracing decidedly the inside of Jamie’s mouth, letting him know in no uncertain terms what it was that the man wanted and expected of him.

With his inner voice now almost completely silent and his need aroused, Jamie was conflicted and at a loss on how to shake off his sixth sense, the one that kept trying to get him to trust that which was not obvious and not visible to the eye at all. And basically, what it told Jamie was that having sex with that guy right now wasn’t the smartest thing to do. Not because he was a total stranger, a slightly suspicious one at that. Not because he may have carried some transmittable disease, or because he might have been dangerous or out of control for one reason or another. It wasn’t even because Jamie could feel bad about it afterwards, just as he did after his first and only one night stand ever, convinced by his friends that he really should try it for once. It wasn’t about Jamie at all. 

It was this irrational hunch that by sleeping with this man Jamie could somehow damage him. As if to that man, sex was a kind of self-defeating experience.

Of course, with the man’s tongue on the way down his throat and his chest pressed against his own, Jamie didn’t have the time, the energy nor the will to get vocal about these intuitions. Which was to say, he was rather too busy putting all three into wondering if the condoms he’d been storing in his bedroom since he and Jessie broke up three years ago had not yet passed the expiry date.

…

“They’re still good!”, Jamie exclaimed triumphantly, tossing a package of condoms at the table where he’d left his guest, who by this time had managed to get rid of his undershirt, exposing his sculpted body. Jamie seated himself on the couch beside the man. “They’ve got one more year to go, isn’t that wonderful? And the point is I didn’t throw them away, even though I thought I wouldn’t need them anymore. I think I’m a genius”, he soliloquized excitedly, like a little kid who unexpectedly came across their Christmas gifts in some random wardrobe or drawer in November. All the apprehension from just a few moments before seemed to have faded away.

The man made no spoken comments (he certainly was not the talkative type), he just raised his eyebrows at this display of Jamie’s exhilaration. He also nodded his head before swiftly proceeding to unbutton Jamie’s shirt and unzipping his jeans.

Jamie closed his eyes for a second, drifting away at the sensation of those fabulous fingers almost stroking his skin. Even in this moment full of promise, he was still bothered by what he’d seen before in the corner of his eyes: a big nasty bruise just under the man’s ribs, a yet another remnant of the battering he’d evidently been a victim of. 

“Be careful with that”, he pleaded with a whisper before he proceeded to kiss the man, gripping his shoulders tightly with his fingers. He felt his skin burning as the man touched his arms underneath the unbuttoned shirt only to shake it off of his back. 

While the man kept sucking on his lips and rubbing them against his own, Jamie, overcome with lust, guided his palms down the man’s chest and belly until he resolutely slid a hand under his boxers. 

He shivered at the warm, solid flesh he sensed beneath his own skin. It was so delightful to observe the man so closely and to learn him so intimately by using just the sense of touch. Feeling his erection rise at Jamie’s gentle strokes made Jamie bite his lip hard; definitely, making this man feel good just felt too good. 

Meanwhile, one of the man’s hands wandered around Jamie’s chest, and the other rested between Jamie’s legs. This made Jamie purr and he spontaneously swung his hips to press his crotch tightly against the man’s open hand.

He drew his touch-thirsty body closer to the man, all engulfed in the vibrating, relentless want. Initially, he intended to sit on his lap and entwine his arms and legs around his back, with the most affection they could think of pulling out of their lovemaking. 

But then, Jamie finally realized exactly the way the man held him and touched him. The attractive stranger clearly wasn’t the cuddly type, and most probably he also wasn’t the ‘I’m-so-curious-for-you-let-me-explore-everything’ type. If the appearances were correct, tender sex on an all-encompassing physical and emotional level can’t have been his cup of tea – and no wonder about that, if he really was that much into random sex with strangers as he appeared to be. 

And fascinatingly, Jamie wouldn’t mind that at all. He was willing to try it his way, whatever that could be. 

Withdrawn and distant as he still remained, the man didn’t seem like he was about to articulate his own needs, or his own visions of what could go on between the two of them. Maybe he was one of those who still believed that sex was simply something that should be done rather than talked about. Well, Jamie was one of those who couldn’t disagree more. 

“Just wondering… Have you got any, like, ideas or something? Any specific wishes about what we could be doing here?” Jamie put on an earnest, heart-warming smile while resting his hand on the man’s dry cheek and scratching that tiny dent behind his ear. He intended to create a friendly buddies-being-honest-with-each-other atmosphere, one as cozy and pressure-free as possible, just in case the man should feel embarrassed or otherwise uncomfortable trying to translate the images from his head into words, and then words into reality. 

But all the response that Jamie got was the man flinching with an aghast look on his face. He gulped nervously and slowly shook his head before muttering a breathy “no”.

It was all too clear he didn’t actually mean it. Jamie crooked his head and pulled a disbelieving face. Then he put his arms around the man’s shoulders and rested the forehead against his.

“Seriously, you can tell me… You’ve got nothing to lose, right? At the worst, I can only say no”, he assured the man light-heartedly as a playful smile crossed his lips. He slid his hand down the man’s torso all the way to his lower abdomen, taking much delight in the tight muscular body and thick strings of veins he recognized underneath.

The man, however, remained silent, walking his gaze down the floor as if he believed that by avoiding Jamie’s eyes he could get away with not answering the question.

And then he simply pulled Jamie’s trousers down to uncover his erection, around which he wrapped those long, slender fingers. It seemed to Jamie as if he was saying _enough of your bullshit, let’s just get down to business at last_. 

Not that Jamie complained. Not in the slightest. He sighed and then bit his lips at the feeling of the man’s fingers right on his tender spots. Flexing his muscles, Jamie straightened his back and slightly moved away to let the man have a better view, although never loosening the clamp of his hands on the man’s chest as he rubbed his palms against the rough skin, massaging the breastbone, smoothing out the ribs, pressing against the nipples. He heard the man sigh with pleasure even as he carried on with the controlled jolting movements of his wrist. And just when Jamie thought he’d have to ask him to let go, worried that otherwise he could come too soon, the man relented with almost an awe-inspiring timing.

He reached with his hand to the table and took a piece from the package of condoms that Jamie had brought there a while before. He put it then in Jamie’s hand, looking at him expectantly before pulling his own trousers down.

Jamie shuddered at the enticing sight, the promise of the gift that awaited him almost making him dizzy.

He shyly stroked the man’s erection; it felt hard and sizzling against his hand. Then he unpacked the condom, careful not to damage it, before he covered the man’s massive manhood despite the trembling fingers. 

He found it difficult to keep his eyes off of the man’s crotch, but his anxious excitement ultimately took over. He searched for the man’s hands to put them on his hips invitingly; then he folded his arms around his neck and embraced him tightly, his unruly panting in the man’s ear telling him more about Jamie’s feelings than any words ever could. 

The man laid then a tiny kiss on Jamie’s lips, which Jamie returned fierily. Next, he made a gesture with his hand, suggesting that Jamie turn around to change his position. So that was what this perverse fantasy the guy was so reluctant to share was about? If that was really all that there was to it, then it must have been pretty modest of an adventurous one night stand seeker. Jamie couldn’t help a smile, his face still only a breath away from the man’s face. 

Afterwards, he willingly bent down to rest on his elbows, pulling his knees up close to his chest and seductively shifting his hips upwards to give his companion a more tempting view.  
The man placed himself above Jamie, who could then feel those wiry hands hold his buttocks. Just as he was preparing for the feeling of a lean finger crawling into his body, the scorching wetness of the man’s tongue intruded inside him with a rare bravery and confidence, infecting Jamie’s blood with its hotness until it seemed like it was about to boil and explode.

That was unexpected, and the sensation was absolutely tantalizing. Letting out a delighted hiss which soon changed into a moan, Jamie gripped helplessly on the dark blue upholstery of the sofa. His body writhed in ecstasy even after the blazing flesh of the man’s tongue was replaced with his agile, daring fingers. Jamie’s body, untouched and neglected for such a long time, now seemed to be turning into a single bright flash of craving. 

While the man was running his fingers back and forth inside Jamie’s rigid frame, pressing, pushing and pulling against all the tender spots, Jamie had to clench his fists as if to resist the waves of rapture lest they overcome him and make him lose his mind. Already struggling to breathe, he somehow managed to slightly lift his upper body on an elbow and angle his head to give the man a passionate kiss of gratitude and invitation. The man readily kissed him back, and the savory, a little coarse taste filled Jamie’s mouth, overlapping with the touch of the man’s fingers finally sliding out of Jamie’s body. 

Shaking and dizzy at the mere thought of what was about to happen, Jamie could hardly control his body screaming for fulfillment. The man was out and ready to give it all to him, and Jamie gasped when he sensed on his lower back a hand damp and warm with his own intimate fluids.

The man’s other hand grabbed Jamie’s hip hard, and before Jamie knew it, he could feel the man’s presence, so firm and radiating and uncompromising, pierce the narrow corridor within Jamie. His lover moved smoothly, reached as far as he could, relented for a second, and once he was sure that Jamie’s body opened up before him, he proceeded even further.

Jamie found himself breathless, in all possible meanings of the world. The touch of the man’s erection rocking inside him felt like a golden rain, a rain of searing flames burning the skin all over Jamie’s body with their bittersweet caresses. His lover’s thrusts were steadfast and apt – if not a little mechanical, but that thought never occurred to Jamie until some time later – showing an immense strength and purely physical stamina, restless even as what seemed like hours, but more likely was minutes, passed by with Jamie under the command of the man’s embrace. Having spent most of his adult life in a long-term relationship, Jamie had had sexual experiences of little diversity, but this one thing he could be sure of: the man was an absolute master of the art. 

Captivated, Jamie turned his head again, among the more and more violent swings of their joined hips trying to brush the man’s face with his elated, thankful kisses. In the raging storm of motions he did the best he could, planting his lips in the corner of the man’s nostril and his wide-opened mouth. The man didn’t reject it, but he didn’t exactly make the task easier for Jamie, who was too overwhelmed too care.

He did begin to care, however, once he was finished, and it happened much too soon for Jamie’s liking – even though it was to be expected with stimulation this strong, with the man’s fierce thrusts and his own penis rubbing steadily against the sofa under the pressure of their connected bodies. 

Exhausted and short of breath, beads of sweat running freely down his boldly exposed body, Jamie meant to dive head-first into this incomparable sensation of bliss and fulfillment, to savor the aftermath, preferably enfolded in his lover’s arms and sharing every breath, every gaze, every silent thought. And yet, he had to snap out of his euphoric intoxication almost as soon as it had begun. 

He did realize the man hadn’t come before Jamie did, kindly pulling away lest his prolonged presence should cause Jamie any pain. This was already something unusual, something that didn’t really happen often – at least from what Jamie knew and had experienced himself, most often it had to take something special for the bottom partner to come sooner than the top. Well, this was something special indeed: the man was certainly a capable and sophisticated lovemaker, while Jamie was sensitive and easily excitable, not to mention after a period of a really long sexual abstinence. So yes, perhaps after all it wasn’t so unexpected for Jamie to be done before him. But still…

Still, when Jamie sat up and looked behind, the sight shocked him.

Kneeling beside him, the man was touching himself aggressively, still fighting his dissatisfied desire. His quest for pleasure apparently had brought him little more than plain physiological struggle to find release: his face, until now never expressing much emotion even as the heat between the two of them reached the highest peaks, was wincing in what appeared as enormous pain.

There was no lust. No joy. No fun. No anything. Just the suffering, pure suffering. And desperation, the savage need for the thing to let him go. Like a runner halfway through the marathon too tired to even stop. Or like a witness of a terrifying accident too petrified to look away. 

Over but a few seconds, delight turned into a serious scare. Jamie waited for a moment or two, but realizing that what he saw wasn’t an illusion, and even more – that the man’s distress didn’t look like it was going to be over soon, he decided to act. 

He pulled himself close and reached out to replace the man’s hands with his. Then he began to energetically touch his lover instead. 

The man seemed rather reluctant about the idea, but he eventually did allow Jamie to take care of him, without even uttering a word. Trouble was that it didn’t change anything. The man was still all stiffened, his organic needs unappeased. The largest flood of tenderness and passion that Jamie was capable of offering to him turned out in vain. 

As he clung to the man’s shattered form, Jamie began to rub his body against his. His hopes of actually helping him come by intensifying and heating up the sensations like that were sincerely fading; truth be told, he was rather attempting to prepare himself for one more round all the way. 

As for Jamie, he was perfectly satisfied, to be sure. He felt no need for another intercourse, or actually, he was too exhausted to even like the idea. But now… this man had given him so much pleasure, and now was left in such unexplainable agony. Jamie felt responsible for him. He had to try to give him release, trying was the least he could do. 

He wrapped his legs around the man’s waist and held him close, face to face, adjusting his hips so that he could plunge inside him again. The penetration this time came with more pain, perhaps predictably, because Jamie wasn’t even half as excited, so the result was that of eating when one’s full. Nevertheless, Jamie was sure that the pain he felt wasn’t so much of a physical nature or origin. It was the man’s desperation and agony that was transmitted to Jamie, sinking into his blood vessels with no inhibitions. Making love to him on such occasion, under these conditions, made Jamie share his mindset. _Just let me come finally, no matter what. Just make this end, just make this pressure go away._

With each and every motion, Jamie had to fight for each and every breath; the sensations were just too much and not on the pleasant side of ‘too much’. The man tightly clutched Jamie’s pelvis to him, shoving, pushing ahead and pulling behind in frantic spasms. Only now did the soulless, mechanical quality of the man’s movements strike Jamie. 

All this wasn’t in the slightest sexy anymore. No sense of lust, no sense of enjoyment, no common sensual ground between them, nothing but the mindless craving. And yet, in a really odd way, Jamie could feel himself very much connected to the man by these bleak feelings they shared and they both were a part of. 

Observing the man’s face, Jamie kept wondering if it had looked this way before, only he couldn’t notice it because of the position they had taken. Or maybe it’d just gotten worse the longer the man couldn’t reach his release. The tortured look on that handsome face, the aching grimace mixed with traces of synthetic arousal, too cold and too urgent to have anything to do with actual excitement, it really made quite an impression. It was hardly a turn-on, but definitely not something forgettable. For better or worse.

The man eventually let out a tormented grunt and turned instantly motionless, his release swelling up inside Jamie’s body. Upon that sensation Jamie came as well: maybe it was the sheer power of the experience, or maybe more of a relief. Anyway, Jamie was truly glad it all was over now.

That was definitely the weirdest sexual experience he’d ever had.

Something told him that for his guest, things like that were an everyday’s reality.


	3. Like frozen sky in October night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of their crazed love-making Jamie tries to make some connection with Brandon: talking, touching, expressing his concern. Apparently all Brandon wants right now, however, is to be left alone and in peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the comments and kudos. We (me + my role-play Brandon) appreciate every single one of them and I can't tell you enough how happy we are to be able to share our story with you. Truth be told, I didn't expect such warm welcome here on AO3, I'm not very used to getting much feedback on my work ^^'. So it really keeps me going and motivates me to finish the story (expect four more chapters to go, excluding this one).
> 
>  
> 
> _As always, special thanks to my role-play Brandon, the author of everything Brandon says and does outside the movie script, and the unquestionable king of all Fassy incarnations and all things Fassy in this relationship._

Curled up on the sofa and, with varying level of success, still trying to catch his breath, Jamie couldn’t shake off his thoughts on what the hell had just happened. 

His guest remained seated beside him with what seemed like safe (safe from what, actually?) distance, motionless and thoroughly unaffected. Eyes closed, head tilted back. He looked weary and indifferent, but physically he seemed no more tired than your typical couch potato who’d just had a slightly fast-paced walk to the nearest subway station. That uncontrollable anguish from when they’d had their second intercourse had all but disappeared and now it may even have seemed some kind of a bad dream. That is, if only Jamie hadn’t had the reminiscence of the man’s pain-struck expression and stressed-out body still clutching onto his memories, so fresh and so vivid. 

Jamie was honestly concerned. He had absolutely no idea what the matter was with his accidental guest. In one corner of his mind he even considered calling for medical help… maybe this sexual agitation combined with such total emotional numbness was, after all, a result of some drug abuse (not that Jamie knew too much about the effects of all those fancy drugs available on the market)? Maybe the guy was about to have a fatal heart attack in just a few moments and Jamie would have to live the rest of his days with the remorse of doing nothing to prevent it. Or something like that. 

Nevertheless, Jamie quickly discarded that guess as unlikely. The man did not seem physically unwell, save for his grayish skin, plus those cuts and bruises. It was more like he was… somehow sunken, imploded. Like his mind and emotions resembled those sickly cheeks in his narrow face.

And Jamie was clueless as to what to do. What to say, if anything. How to act, if anyhow. 

Leaning against the backrest of the sofa, with his azure gaze he traced the man’s lanky form. He was looking for any tiny sign, a motion, a shudder, a wince, any kind of prompt, conscious or unconscious, on the man’s part. All the while, he also had to fight his own urge to go and cuddle the man, to console him and assure that everything was alright, and that whatever it was that was bothering him, here with Jamie he was safe. If only Jamie had had the nerve and the confidence to claim so, that is. 

But somehow Jamie managed to keep that raging sympathy of his at bay. He followed a rule he’d blindly obey while at work, which was: never lavish a dog with your affections until he goes for them first. _Let him decide if he wants you close._

Some dogs would never want Jamie close, because that was simply the way they were with strangers, or veterinarians, or people in general. And some had a good reason not to trust him, as in they had been hurt before and his very presence reminded them of the worst memories of their lifetime; those dogs simply expected Jamie to bring them little else than further harm. For the sake of this man’s good, Jamie sincerely hoped that he was the former case, while in fact his intuition kept telling him that it was the latter.

Following a related rule, _if he doesn’t like to be touched, then let him fight or flee – don’t assault him, just give him the choice_ , Jamie finally dared to brush the man’s hand with his fingers. As there had still been no flight nor fight on the part of the man, Jamie went a little bit further and bravely tapped his forehead on the man’s shoulder. 

Still not exactly discouraged by the lack of reaction on his guest’s part (firmly believing that if he didn’t like it, he would simply pull away), Jamie finally found it in himself to try and break the silence.

“You’re really good, you know? I mean, at these things…”

The man finally provided Jamie with a passing look. A rather surprised one.

“Are you serious?”, he replied in disbelief, and Jamie felt oddly amused at his own observation that this must have been the first question-like thing the man had uttered so far, compared to the shower of questions that Jamie had already had thrown his way.

“Yes, I am. But um…” Jamie grazed the man’s ash-green eyes with a soft peek, trying to figure out which words to pick to address most adequately – and respectfully – the problem he was about to voice. “Don’t be offended if I’m being too frank… and if I’m wrong, please just tell me so.” He took a deep breath before proceeding to his somewhat more confrontational line. “It’s just that I’ve got this impression that you don’t really enjoy any of this. Even though you know how to do all these things, and you do them well, and you can give me so much pleasure… you can’t feel any of this pleasure yourself, can you?” 

The man’s lips twitched for a second, as if defensively. The stare he planted upon Jamie’s face this time was much more attentive, perhaps even menacing. 

“I like it. A lot”, he responded, stressing every syllable. He seemed all set on correcting Jamie’s misguided opinions on him.

 _Don’t rush it_ , Jamie thought to himself. He had to play it careful. If there was a slightest chance to help this man anyhow, to bring him relief, Jamie absolutely wouldn’t allow it to escape. And therefore, to make him feel assaulted or judged was the last thing Jamie wanted.

So instead, he observantly nodded his head, with his gaze diving further into the man’s eyes.

“What exactly do you like about it? What is it that you’re looking for?”

The man sent him a curt, unwelcoming look before snapping out of their eye contact.

“I just happen to like it.” 

Jamie nodded once more. To relieve some of the tension from the scene, he stretched his body in a seemingly carefree way. Then he looked up and smiled a light, unassuming smile, as if to say _don’t worry, it’s not about you at all, it’s all about me, alright? It’s just that I’m having this sudden need to chatter about my sex life. Nobody’s attacking you. **Your** sex life is really no big deal. You don’t have to be so alert. You don’t._

“Well, because for me, what I like about sex is that… let me see… For example, it gives me this feeling of intimacy with someone I like, it helps me get to know him better. And I also like the fact that sex demands a lot of trust from me, so that when I decide to give it a go, it means that I trust the other person and that I’m ready to let him discover things about me, such things that nobody else may know, or often those that even I don’t know myself”. He let out a small chuckle. “I also like the opportunity to share the pleasure that two people can give to one another and to admire each other’s bodies… Well, a whole lot of things, isn’t it?” He laughed quietly again, with a one of the kind mixture of timidity and pride. 

What he counted on was that this list would coax his lover into some kind of response. That the man would say in return: _come to think of it, yes, maybe I like that about sex too_ , or _well I like it for totally different reasons_ , or _even you know what, that’s so full of shit_. But all he did was give Jamie another of those frigid looks, a nod, and a brief:

“Yeah, that’s really a lot.” 

So he was unimpressed. Not really resentful, maybe surprisingly – only disaffected. He didn’t care, that was all. Unconsciously, Jamie had to fight the feelings of hurt and shame swelling up his throat. 

Did he _want_ him to care, after all?

Going a bit against himself, Jamie sent the stranger another agreeable, neutral smile. The more serious he felt on the inside, the more he tried to deny it; it was as if he sensed that there was room for only one miserable person on that sofa.

“How about you? Do you feel the same way?”, he asked with an apparent guilelessness. “Do you trust the people you go to bed with?”, he specified his seemingly-naïve inquiry, at the same time making an attempt to lay his head on the man’s exposed lap, still damp with sweat. By doing this this, Jamie meant to finally provoke some kind of reaction from the man, either a definite yes or definite no. And secretly, he was hoping that by accepting Jamie’s head on his lap, in such an intimate, romantic pose, the man would say yes to Jamie’s question even if he didn’t put it into words.

But the man did nothing about Jamie’s head weighing on his thighs. 

“I think I don’t believe in this kind of stuff”, Jamie heard him say in a jaded voice. 

It was then that a suspicion of a horrifying truth finally dawned on Jamie.

The man let him close not because he was alright with that. He let Jamie touch him, reduce the distance and express his fondness not because he didn’t mind it. It was all because he was too messed up to protest, and too fatigued to struggle. He sincerely was indifferent to whatever was happening to him. Jamie might have begun to skin him alive instead and his response would probably be all the same.

_He didn’t care._

“I’m sorry”, was all that Jamie found himself capable of saying. And that was a genuinely vague understatement. He wasn’t sorry. He was heartbroken. And upset. And worry-struck. Not even as much at his own distress, his slightly damaged self-esteem at those signs of rejection – that was simply a childish thing to feel and Jamie knew himself well enough to be certain he would get over it soon – as at the ailing of this dissociated, unapproachable man, so lonely, so withdrawn and given up, who Jamie could literally do nothing for. 

He decided to try his luck again, just in case, but he already could predict what the results would be. 

He reached out his hand to stroke the man’s barely haired chest, just as he imagined lovers could do in the aftermath of their act.

“Would you like to talk for a while? Or… should we just go to sleep now?”

Initially, the man remained silent. It was Jamie’s guess if he was hesitant about how to answer, or if he’d been so engulfed in his own thoughts that he could hardly hear Jamie’s question and now had to play it back in his mind time and again to actually realize what on earth Jamie wanted from him this time. 

“I think I want to go to sleep”, he managed to finally utter. Jamie did his best not to notice the cold sting piercing through his chest. 

Whatever else it was that he’d been trying to achieve that night, he had to give it up in an instant.

“Sure.” He braced himself enough to curve his lips in yet another good-natured smile and even went as far as to plant a kind brotherly kiss on the man’s handsome broad forehead. Damn if he wasn’t a good liar after all. “Come with me, I’ll show you the bedroom. … I can stay here, if you prefer to sleep alone.” By this time Jamie had already no more illusions about what the man would have to say about the offer.

As expected, the man gave Jamie a simple nod. “Right. I’d like that, if I may. I can stay on the cough, though.” He seemed like a decent guy, after all. With a decent upbringing and so-so manners, if only he remembered to show them. Jamie smiled and shook his head.

“There’s no need for you to. You’ll be more comfortable there, more…well, relaxed. We can close the door and everything. Besides, we won’t risk me waking you up if I get up earlier in the morning.” And, truth be told, Jamie would feel bad, with his own decent upbringing and so-so manners, if he had his own guest sleep on the couch. Even an unexpected, puzzling guest such as that.

And so the time came for Jamie to draw back, both physically and mentally. That night he could do nothing for this anguished stranger, nothing more than offering him he could sleep alone in Jamie’s bedroom. And that was simply the way things were, nothing more and nothing less to it. 

_He had to let it go._


	4. If I wait for stormy skies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The night is over and it's like nothing ever happened. Jamie dreams about his own happy past and yearns for someone to hold him, but Brandon, now somewhat more sociable but unapproachable as ever, does not seem interested in carrying on with their relationship. They part and go their own ways, chances of ever replaying that night ranging from meager to zero.

Jamie woke up around six in the morning. He lifted his upper body on the elbow and sleepily brushed back his ruffled semi-long hair with his fingers. 

He winced, feeling expectedly sore in his lower back. Slowly, his consciousness began to recall why it was that he’d ended up on the couch, feeling so strained and burnt out.

He was sure he had been dreaming of something. Possibly it could have been a nightmare, telling from the tension in his body and the haziness inside his head. Luckily, he couldn’t remember anything. The bad part, however, was that the moment that sleep had begun to let go of his hold on him, while still drowning in the thick fog of half-asleep Jamie had this very believable vision that he was lying on this very couch in Jessie’s embrace, with his head on his lap, the way he had always used to. And that he had just opened his mouth, trying to tell him _You know what, I’ve just had this crazy dream, it really freaked me out, makes me wonder if I’m alright? … I met this strange guy in a club and let him fuck me twice, but he didn’t enjoy it at all and couldn’t even come, you think there could be something wrong with me?_ But then he hesitated, and instead just wanted to ask _Why the hell do you feel so cold, Jess?_

And it was then that consciousness entered the picture sharply, only to make Jamie realize that Jessie wasn’t there. That he was trying to talk to a shadow. 

_Seriously, Jamie M., you’re so messed up. Jessie’s been gone for three years. He’s gone because he was unable to bear with you any longer. And also because he fell for an almost-underage Latino boy model, but that petty little detail really shouldn’t have mattered anything to you, should it._

Jamie yawned, stretched his body and bravely decided to pull himself together so as to take some constructive action, before he would drown in the endless ocean of brooding and self-pity. He still had his guest behind the closed door of his bedroom, and as long as he was there, it would be unwise and selfish of Jamie to carry on with the dark fantasies on the misery of his own life. 

And besides, brooding and self-pity would definitely be a lame way to start a day, no matter the circumstances.

And so Jamie made this heroic effort and got up. He looked for his cats, said hello to them, gave them some strokes and ear scratches, got rubbed back (at least something warm did live in this apartment, which was good news… naturally there were also the hamsters, but Jamie kept their cage in the bedroom, at the moment occupied by the stranger, so they were temporarily unavailable), and fed them. 

Then he trudged to the bathroom and took a shower. Warm streams of water massaged his skin with the most gentle touch he had experienced in these couple of hours, making his stale blood run a little faster. He tried not to think about how lonely this setting felt, the puffs of steam circling around his naked form never quite able to replace anyhow a tender embrace of a fellow human being.

After a couple of minutes, Jamie managed to convince himself out of the warm cuddle of his shower cabin in order to proceed with his normal everyday routine. He brushed his teeth, he shaved his face smooth, he put some underpants and jeans on, and grabbed a coffee, which he drank with his cats on his lap so that the overbearing silence wouldn’t crush him. 

He peeked anxiously in the direction of his bedroom, but no signs of life were audible just yet from behind the door. Jamie moved his cats aside and boiled some more water to make another coffee, and prepared some toasts for breakfast. Before he knew it, the clock pointed to quarter to seven. Still not even a rustle resounded from the bedroom. Jamie sighed. Man, that was going to be awkward.

As if to earn some more time for his guest and give him a chance to get up on his own, Jamie put on a shirt in really apathetic movements. Still not exactly rushing the things, he also fixed his collar and cuffs, he began to fasten the buttons, and only then did he decide to approach the door, rather reluctantly.

He knocked, but there was no answer. Jamie wasn’t an accomplished mind-reader (even though he sometimes liked to flatter himself with the idea, he was well aware of how far away from the reality it was), so he couldn’t decide if that was supposed to mean _yes, no_ or _I’m trying to sleep, so fuck off_. And so he had to carry on in a more definite manner.

“Um… Hi there, I’m really sorry, but I have to get to work on time, so we’re going to have to leave in some twenty minutes.” He paused attentively for a while, let out a silent sigh of relief at the sound of the bed screeching under a body movement, and added in a more cheerful tone: “You can go and take a shower if you’d like. Your coffee and breakfast are waiting for you”.

Then he withdrew to the kitchen annex to finish the breakfast preparations; totally unsuspecting, he almost dropped a plate full of toasts with jam and peanut butter when he saw the man emerging from the room stark naked. And it was in spite of the fact that Jamie had made sure to collect the man’s clothes and fold them in the bedroom before, exactly so that they would avoid a rather embarrassing situation of his guest running around Jamie’s apartment in his birthday suit in a quest to find anything to put on.

‘Did he forget he had his clothes with him in the bedroom?’, twitched Jamie, realizing at the same time that it couldn’t have been the case – he had them arranged right at the bedside table, so that the man would be unable to miss them when he got up. Could it be, then, that he was doing that on purpose?

Jamie cleared his throat uneasily, concerned that otherwise he wouldn’t be able to squeeze any articulated sound from his clamped vocal chords. “Did you sleep well?”, he managed to mutter, for some reason trying hard not to let his guest know how restless his nudity had made him.

And as if that weren’t enough, the man turned around to face Jamie, full-frontal, before he replied casually “Yeah, okay, thanks”.

He also made that funny gesture with his head, looking around as if he thought there was someone else in the room and had to make sure if it was really him that Jamie had directed his question at.

It didn’t take much more than that for Jamie’s blood to start sizzling once more. If his thoughts had been rushing, now they were jumping and spinning in a self-induced whirlwind. What was this man doing? Didn’t he know what effect it had on Jamie? What did he want? Was that an invitation, or just a cold-blooded tease? 

“Great”, Jamie muttered half-heatedly. And then he carefully approached the man, afraid that any more rapid movements could scare him away. He could hear very clearly his own inner voice of reason shouting right into his ear: _What the hell are you doing? Are you out of your mind? That night was a disaster, have you already forgotten all of that sick stuff? Do you really want all that pain to happen again, to both of you?_ But little did Jamie care. All he could see was that beautiful vision of a ravishing naked man within his arm’s reach, and all he could feel was his own desperate, lonely yearning to be touched.

The man withstood Jamie’s gaze without even a blink. He maybe not as much as seemed to enjoy it, but he definitely didn’t mind being scrutinized by Jamie to that degree in every nook and cranny of his exposed body.

“How about you, did you sleep well?”, he even asked Jamie back, a that far unheard soft tone ringing in his voice. Jamie grew dubious. Was this small talk just an appearance, the man’s odd idea of a foreplay? Or was it really just as a naïve inquiry as it seemed? And while Jamie was in great pains to figure that matter out, the man submitted another question. “When do you have to leave, again?”

“In twenty minutes”, Jamie repeated himself from a few minutes before, and swallowed uncomfortably. He made a tiny shaking movement with his head; brutally trampling on that inner voice of reason, he wanted to clasp any and all the chances that he could still possibly have and make them his own. “Or maybe… maybe a few minutes more”, he corrected himself shyly.

The man gazed back at him and Jamie couldn’t decide if that jade look of his was in fact expectant or doubtful. Of course, the former option was everything that Jamie would choose to see.

“I’ll just take a quick shower”, the man announced, and through the maniac throbbing of his own heart Jamie could almost hear him say _You’re welcome to join me._

But the man obviously didn’t say that. Why would he. Making things any easier or more clear for Jamie? No way.

On the other hand, Jamie had to admit that he did enjoy that special tingle of anxiety mixed up with excitement at the vision of what might happen in a few seconds. And it really didn’t matter if he had no reasons to hope this one could actually come true. _You’re such an emotion junkie, it’s unbelievable_ , Jessie once told him. And he was right, even though it really was a classical pot calling the kettle back little scheme. 

Fighting off the tension, which accumulated with every passing second until it felt like it was going to rip Jamie apart from the inside, in the end he gave it a shot and leant towards the man to kiss him.

The already familiar, ripe sensation of his lips was close enough to making Jamie’s chest burst. 

Everything ended, however, before it even really started. The man did brush Jamie’s lips back, but he also pulled away from the kiss as soon as he could. Then he disappeared in the bathroom, alone. Finally, at least his back seemed to be sending to Jamie a truly definite message: 

‘Fuck off, the night is over’.

Jamie pressed his lips hard, and it didn’t help that he could still feel the man’s taste on the tip of his tongue. 

It was all a little too much for him. Swaying back to the kitchen annex, he engaged all of his personal strength and determination – little of which he might have had left – to fight off the sorrow brimming in his eyes, a black magic potion of humiliation, solitude, rejection, and that grim, grim helplessness. 

He took a grip on himself just in time for the man’s return from the bathroom, this time fortunately fully dressed. 

In general, he looked calmer than the day before, but that was the dead kind of calm, not the comfortable one. Nevertheless, he did seem somewhat more sociable. He even engaged in some polite dialogue, which Jamie rather appreciated, since this time he himself didn’t feel up to initiating any friendly appearances. 

The man asked Jamie some well-behaved questions about his job and workplace. He thanked him for breakfast, although he didn’t have any, claiming that he was not used to eating this early in the morning (which somehow didn’t surprise Jamie at all, given the lanky, unhealthy form of the man which must have had something to do with a rushed, unhealthy lifestyle). He was careful to keep his distance, but at the same time at least he tried to avoid the awkward silence. 

So he was a rather nice guy, after all. He definitely must have been a lovable person, or he would have been be one if he hadn’t been going through that unnamed, unspecified tribulation in his life. Jamie was quite positive about this conclusion. And of course it didn’t alleviate any of the pain on the inside. Making himself hate the man would have been that much easier on him. 

When they were about to part at the entrance to the subway station, trying not to think about how he was making a complete idiot of himself, Jamie dug into the pocket of his overcoat and took out a notepad on which he had scribbled – back when the man was still asleep and Jamie had sort of convinced himself that this would make any sense – his name, home address and mobile phone number. He then shoved the paper into the man’s pocket with an explanation that turned into a rather miserable advertising monologue.

“You can call me anytime… Besides, you know where I live, right? I tend to spend most of my evenings at home, so you can come unannounced whenever you feel like it.” _Does that make me sound like a total desperate?_ , quivered Jamie at the sound of the line he had just uttered. He quickly looked for words that would dispel this impression, to a rather sorry effect. “It doesn’t have to be the sex… Really, it can be whatever you need from me, just talking, or playing with the hamsters, or really anything.” Now he didn’t sound like a desperate anymore. Now he was a plain sales assistant.

The man accepted the notepad and summed up Jamie’s monologue with a short “Thanks”. It wasn’t the drama, but a sharp sting of realism that told Jamie very firmly that in all likelihood the man wasn’t ever going to use it.

Afterwards, Jamie thanked the man for the last night, and the man thanked him back. Jamie didn’t bother to ask the man his name. He knew there would be no point. Or rather, this time he allowed his inner voice to convince himself about it – the last time he ignored it, and the time before too, the results were quite wretched.

The man then turned around and once again in less than an hour, Jamie was left to powerlessly watch his back disappear in the distance.

And so Jamie knew that most probably (and yet, how distortedly he relished in that slight possibility of unrealistic favorable outcome lingering in that promising sound of the word _probably_ ) that was it. Over. He wouldn’t get to see that man anymore. 

He couldn’t shake that lonely feeling that all that had happened the night before was simply pointless, as futile as anything lately in Jamie’s life.


	5. Two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Days go by and Jamie is doing his best not to feel too disappointed by Brandon's expected complete disappearance. And then Brandon suddenly shows up, in a worse than hopeless state. Apparently when his world fell apart and he had nowhere to run to, something made him go back to Jamie's appartment.

For the next couple of days following their encounter, Jamie tried to load himself with work and not to think about the stranger anymore. But he couldn't help his feelings. He couldn't get the man out of his head. All that grim despair, all the bleak, pleasureless want. And also the way that he was impossible to approach and soothe. It got to Jamie very strong and wouldn't let go.

Sometimes, for example during a coffee break at work, Jamie would wonder what it actually was that made him so stuck on that man. Sure, he was Jamie's type, but then again Jamie had never been the one to fall for appearances alone. The fact that the man seemed so lost and helpless also definitely appealed to Jamie's protective instincts - he did like to have someone to care about. And not to be bothered by someone that desolate and pained would go against Jamie’s most basic instincts of compassion. Also, the man had given Jamie some good quality sex, at least in terms of the technique, because as for the emotional aspects, they would have been best forgotten about.

Still, all this didn’t amount to much. It wasn't enough, it can't have been enough for Jamie to get so obsessed about a random suspicious guy he went to bed with right after he’d met him, and a night with whom eventually turned into a more or less horrible experience.

And then Jamie suddenly had a revelation, which happened somewhere in between stitches he’d just been trying to sew upon some poor creature’s belly – and it was indeed lucky for all parties (Jamie, the patient, and the patient’s owner) involved that this didn’t lead to any massacre on the operation table. 

And namely, he realized that he was drawn to the man so much because deep down inside, he felt that they were very much alike.

It was like a verse in that Pink Floyd song. _Just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year._

Of course, Jamie had no good reasons to feel that way. It was irrational. But it didn’t matter, because that was the way he felt and he couldn’t change it – and, as he frankly believed, he also shouldn’t. 

So the man was lost. Alone. Out there on a hopeless solitary search for anyone to find him, to reach out to him and make him feel like he belonged. And Jamie was exactly the same. Now he knew that he’d been feeling deeply connected to that man from the very moment they met, both so detached and confused in that crowded place where just about everyone else seemed to have fun and be getting exactly what they came there for, or at least genuinely enjoy themselves. 

And on an even deeper level, Jamie sensed that their connection stemmed from how the man all along had seemed to reject all help whatsoever, like he thought he didn’t deserve it, or that no amount of help could make any difference. Jamie should have known that, because he was exactly the same way. 

So yes, it was there, it had been there from the very beginning. Jamie just wasn’t present to these feelings himself, because they were so absurd. 

Because after all, why should Jamie even think that? Perhaps it was all nothing but projection. After all, he knew absolutely nothing about that man wreckage he stumbled upon the other night. There was no good justification if he imagined that they had any common ground. The man was devastated, no doubt, and hurting, very well – but still, this did not imply that he and Jamie could be in any way alike. Much less that the man should in fact need Jamie for anything. There could have been plenty of reasons why a beaten up man should wind up in a gay club late at night, looking for some casual one night stands to kill the inner suffering and forget about all that was fucked up. There could have been plenty of reasons why such a casual one night stand should in the end bring that man more pain than pleasure. But there may have been not a single reason why that man should need Jamie in his life, nor not a single reason why Jamie should need him.

Except that Jamie’s emotional instincts were hardly ever wrong.

Then again, this matter was serious, and all the same possibly too ludicrous even for Jamie. His poor, mistreated inner voice of reason tried to tell him: Jamie, don’t get too worked up on this one. It was very likely that the way he perceived that night they had spent together was indeed very different from the way it was in reality. He took it as a profound, almost spiritual experience, wherein every gesture, every breath and every second, spoken and silent alike, had their meaning – while in reality it really may have been nothing more than a piece of dry fucking with someone accidental, someone who could have been replaced with anyone else to exactly the same effect.

And the more time had passed, the more confused about all this Jamie would become. The lines between reality and imagination became blurred, his memories melted into one with his emotions. Sometimes everything about it seemed so surreal that he was close to believing it was all just a crazy dream. His mind was clearly playing tricks on him. He didn’t even know if he could trust his own memory anymore.

But still… Still.

It was the fifth day after they’d met. Jamie was lying comfortably on the couch, a volume of T. Merill poetry in his hands, pondering over the verses with a quiet Leonard Cohen tune murmuring in the background. Suddenly a noise attracted his attention. And it was definitely a knock on the door.

Trying not to think about what his inexplicably pounding heart was trying to tell him, Jamie unlocked the door and opened them only to reveal him standing there. 

The one he had been waiting for.

There he was, right there in Jamie’s doorway, coming along like a miracle, but looking like a nightmare. If previously he had seemed unwell, then now he was downright sick with this ash-grey complexion, disheveled stubble and sunken, circled eyes. He wore exactly the same clothes as the other day: dark green anorak, grayish sweatshirt and a pair of black jogging trousers. The uncompromising body stench implied that in fact he may have not changed his outfit since. 

He was barely able to stand straight, swaying even as he leaned against the doorsill. 

Jamie was flabbergasted, but couldn’t decide which was the more important cause of his shock: the terrifying state that the man was in, or the fact that somewhere inside himself Jamie had expected, no, he _had sensed_ that it was him, finally after the waiting of all these long lonely hours.

All this only added the power to Jamie’s loss of words. At times like this he was thankful for coming from a medical profession: he had trained himself to first act, then to think, and only then to allow himself to feel. It was an almost autopilot mode which on many occasions had so far permitted him to help all those tormented or abused animals under most unconceivable circumstances without his own heart being ripped apart and reason collapsing in the process.

“Come here”, he urged the man with the most warmth he could squeeze out of his breath-taken voice. He wrapped an arm around the man’s waist, making him lean against his shoulder, and thus he attempted to walk him across the threshold of his apartment. 

In the back of his mind, it really scared Jamie how cold the man felt against his own body warmth, and how little of a burden his skinny form seemed upon him. He tried his best, however, not to think of what may have brought this condition upon the man. Not yet. For now it would be of no use. Now he really needed to focus on the how (he could help him), rather than on the what (had really happened). 

No sooner had he made the step across the threshold of Jamie’s apartment, however, than the man stopped and finally said something in that shaky, painful voice, barely keeping any coherence in his words.

“I… see, you know, I really don’t want to cause any trouble… I don’t want to be a bother… It’s just that I found your address in my pocket and I… I just thought, you know… I didn’t know what to do, everything’s so…” His heavy, exhausted breathing prompted him to interrupt the explanation – and also, as it seemed, to review his opinions and have a change of heart. “No”, he shook his head, as if to add more firmness to the tiny word he had just said. “No, never mind, forget it. I’d only be a bother. I’ve got to go now. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

It may have been the longest Jamie had ever heard the man speak. And he knew very well why that was: once the man uttered something more than shards of broken sentences, it had to be something that pierced Jamie’s soul mercilessly with all its echoing helplessness and despondency. 

Struggling to keep his own feelings at bay so they would not interfere with how he could help the unexpected guest, Jamie rested a hand upon the man’s shoulder, firmly but reassuringly. He looked steadily in the man’s eyes, now dilated with fear, like in a cornered animal.

“Look”, Jamie began in a soothing, but confident voice. “You’ve somehow made it here, and this proves that something inside you believes that I can help you. And I believe that, too, so please let me.” As he made his point clear, he drew himself closer to the man’s shivering body, thus locking him up in the unyielding safety of his embrace.

The man wobbled once again and, ultimately letting go of his defenses – probably he had no choice but to do so – he rested that exhausted body against Jamie’s secure support. Like in a kind of a trance, he kept whispering that he was sorry. 

“That’s okay, really, everything’s alright”, Jamie explained hearteningly as he led the man into the living room. “Don’t worry about a thing, everything’s going to be alright, yes?” Somewhere in the back of his mind he found himself strangely in awe at his own voice, or how on earth he managed to sound so convincing when in fact he was the one who had no idea what the hell was going on – and the one terrified at his own ignorance.

And so Jamie walked the man to the couch, the very same they made love on the other day. He helped him up, then covered him tightly with a blanket. His guest was obviously dizzy, and dazed as if he was on the verge of losing his consciousness. It already was a kind of a miracle that he actually had found his way to Jamie’s apartment, having visited it just once and led both to and out of it by Jamie.

When Jamie touched his cheeks and forehead, the man’s skin felt steel cold, paper-dry, and yet feverish. A scary suspicion crawled upon Jamie’s mind that it can’t have been just the clothes that hadn’t changed about the man since the other day; it also appeared very likely that he had hardly eaten or drunk anything. He was simply emaciated.

For a moment there Jamie felt like back at the hospital where he worked, on those nervous moments when they’d bring a lacerated pet just hit by the car, and looking at all the damage Jamie had to make his calls about what to take care of first, his fear of making a mistake resulting in losing or irreversibly harming the patient notwithstanding. Here he had an identical situation: he was going to decide what was the most urgent part to fix in this picture of misery and misfortune, and he had to hope the man wouldn’t pay the price if Jamie’s call was mistaken.

And as he had no time to think it over, he went along with what his intuitions told him. First dehydration. Then warming him up. And then he could assess what to do next, if the situation was serious enough to call an ambulance or if it would suffice just to lay him down, give him something to eat and let him get some sleep.

He took off the man’s shoes, sport ones, like the ones used for jogging. Sticky with days-old sweat, they clung to the socks so strongly it really was a good thing that they didn’t come off along with some skin – and this was actually something that bothered Jamie much more than the accompanying reeking odor. For that part Jamie was thankful for his own job, where he would often experience much worse on a daily basis.

He went to the kitchen and, making up for the lack of drugstore electrolytes, he prepared some amount of salty water. Coming back, he passed by the radio to turn it off. The music in the background was distracting and did not feel appropriate.

And how ironic was that the song playing right then was actually In my secret life. Could this have been a coincidence? 

_I bite my lip, I buy what I’m told_   
_From the latest hit to the wisdom of old_   
_But I’m always alone and my heart is like ice_   
_And it’s crowded and cold in my secret life_

Jamie shuddered at the image that was spreading right before his eyes, a man that seemed a veritable embodiment of those soul-crushing lyrics, an image straight from reality, one so much more accurate than any lyricist could ever conceive of.

He sat by the man, doing his best not to reflect too much upon the heartbreaking view of the man looking so tormented, struggling for every single breath. He held the man’s back to help him sit comfortably, wrapping his arm around his patient’s sunken chest and making a backrest out of his own torso; with the other hand he drew the glass of salty water to the man’s face and turned it so that the liquid would pour straight into his mouth.

Sensing the rather atrocious taste of the homemade medicine, the man winced, pulling a remarkably funny face, given the circumstances.

“I know”, Jamie shushed him like he was a little child in his arms. “Yeah, I know, I know, but you really need this right now.”

The man was brave enough, however, swallowing everything that Jamie made him drink without any protests. Once he was done, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, which fortunately sounded much easier and calmer in Jamie’s ears than anything before.

Jamie put the empty glass back on the table and once more he fixed the blanket over the man’s cold-numbed body, making him rest cozily against his own shoulders. He could still feel the man shiver beside him, and frankly, now that Jamie had pulled him so close, his chills seemed even worse.

“Do you think you could get some sleep now? No? Not even a tiny nap?”, he suggested with a patient and non-imposing tone, like he would to a fever-frustrated preschooler. His guest was, however, quite decisive about his opinion.

“No. I don’t want to sleep. I can’t sleep.” If that was the case, Jamie wasn’t in a position to persist. Who knew what nightmares could await the unfortunate man in that condition, after whatever he had been through. 

He rubbed the man’s back energetically, as a consolation, but also for practical reasons to make his idle blood run faster.

“I see… Okay, so could you please wait here for a second?”, Jamie asked and, correctly not bothering to wait for a reply, he left for the bathroom. 

As swiftly as he could, he ran the bathtub full with hot water. He also wanted to add some bathing salt to make the bath time more relaxing, but he justly gave the idea up as he remembered that the man’s skin may still have been cut, or damaged in any other way, so adding salt or anything perfumed was probably not the best idea. Thus, he just left the bathtub as it was, transparent, steamy and pure.

Then he came back to the living room to pick his guest up. Still keeping the blanket around the man, he took him by the shoulders and helped him into the bathroom. 

The man was very obedient, following Jamie unquestioningly with each and every step, and Jamie knew there was not much trust about it, just surrender. He even got this uneasy idea that if it had been a garbage dump or an electric chair instead of a bathroom that Jamie was leading him into, the man would have followed him in there with no traces of resistance nonetheless. 

He unwrapped the blanket from around the man’s body and hesitantly put his hands on the zipper of his anorak, giving the man an inquiring look. The man looked back, or rather kept staring blankly into an indefinite space in front of him rather than at Jamie, with an expected _it doesn’t matter, I don’t care anymore_ silence. And so Jamie decided not to make this rather nervous moment last any longer. Without any further ceremonies, he began to undress him.

The man’s clothes were so sticky with all the dirt and sweat that again Jamie really had to watch out if he didn’t want to damage the already irritated skin underneath, still full of bruises and sores. It was so difficult to imagine – difficult because it hurt, not because it was unexplainable – what this man must have gone through in the last few days. And now he was standing there, wobbly with the giddiness of his exhaustion, so vulnerable, so dependent, like a child. He let out a small sigh every now and then, and avoided Jamie’s gaze every time Jamie looked up. 

He seemed ashamed, somehow. That expert sex technician, that supposed king of random one night stands appeared now ashamed of his nakedness, of the way he looked and smelt, of the way he couldn’t handle himself and had to rely on an almost complete stranger to save him. There was something desperately sad about that to Jamie, and yet desperately endearing.

“It’s okay, see? It’s okay”, Jamie would break the silence every now and then, moving to a different piece of clothing to get it undone. He kept a steady pace undressing the man, showing him all possible respect in the process, but also trying not to make the job last too long, afraid that the man would perceive it like a kind of a show, intended only to embarrass and torment him deeper. “We’ll get you warmed up and you’ll feel much better in a minute, I promise, we’ll make it good, yes? You’ll be alright, trust me, you will.” 

He pulled the man’s naked form close to himself, careful not to frighten him with that sudden proximity – and not to wonder too much about what on earth that guy had done to that beautiful body that had amazed Jamie so much the other day. 

He held him safely and with confidence, telling himself that by doing so he would prevent the man from falling apart before his very eyes. 

They spent a few long seconds like that, the man still shivering and appearing too weak to even lift his leg and get into the bathtub on his own. Jamie propped his thigh with a hand and helped him bend the knee and move it upwards, all the while providing a stable support for his back and shoulders with his own body. It wasn’t just the practical reasons. He really wanted to let the man know that he had all the support in Jamie that he could possibly imagine. He wanted him to realize that he really could afford to let down his guard, to be weak and dependent essentially, because Jamie wouldn’t ever let him down.

And just as he was starting to consider simply carrying him into the bathtub – which would be difficult given the difference in their height, but not impossible given that the man was less muscular than Jamie and could have weighed less, too – the man managed to enter the water on his own. He was very brave.

Moreover, he also managed to take Jamie by surprise when, having seated himself steadily and stretched his body beneath the steamy water in spite of his hyper-tense muscles, he muttered:

“It’s really nice”.

Jamie responded instantly with a broad smile. He didn’t expect the man to talk, much less say anything positive, not now. And yet… yes, Jamie’s impression from only a while ago was correct: indeed, he was very brave.

“I’m glad”, he replied as he immersed his own elbow in the water to make sure once more the water wasn’t too hot for someone this debilitated. It wasn’t, so he gently rinsed the man’s chest and neck to help him get used to the temperature, and also to make his frozen blood run faster. He put the other arm around him, thus making a convenient backrest, at the same time retaining control over the situation, enabling himself to act quickly in case the man got dizzy or even fainted. 

In the process he had dampened both sleeves of his black sweatshirt, but he didn’t mind that. He hardly even noticed it.

The man closed his eyes and for a moment there he really seemed at peace, away from all the pain and troubles – until he laughed.

It was a bitter, dry laughter. It resounded with irony, anger, self-loathing, regret, and all the other hopeless feelings of the world that could be conceived of. It made Jamie cringe on the inside, his vocal chords cramped with his useless compassion.

He knelt by the bathtub and rubbed the man’s shoulders comfortingly. He couldn’t help the feeling like he was touching a knot of wires rather than human flesh.

“Don’t think about that, okay? Don’t think at all, please, you’re safe now… Nobody wants anything from you, just try to relax, it’s okay”, Jamie pleaded. 

Then he felt a tingle of a buzzing heartache when the man’s reaction to his words crystallized in the form of a single tear strolling down his withered cheek. 

That tear was so pure, so beautiful. And so sharp, like a blade of steel straight into Jamie’s soul.

And it also carried a message with itself – an echo of a shy, quiet, but audibly moved murmur that said: “Thank you”. 

Jamie took a deep breath and with the wet back of his hand he followed the traces of that single teardrop down the man’s face. He felt a sudden urge to squeeze him so hard they both could almost suffocate, to hold him so close and become one with him once again. Childish and dreamy as it may have seemed, he wished he could chase away all the demons and keep him by his side, forever safe, peaceful and fulfilled. 

But all he could do – all he could allow himself to do – was to gently press the man’s emaciated body to himself and, allowing the wetness of the man’s skin and face to spread all the way to his own already moistened body, to cover him with his sure embrace once more. 

He could find no good words to say, no such words that would be appropriate just now. And so, rather than disturbing the precious silence with inadequate attempts of self-expression, he settled for a very – in his own opinion – casual response.

“You’re more than welcome.”


	6. I know it's good to be alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fresh out of the bath and back into the world of the living, Brandon seems to be getting more and more comfortable in Jamie's place. This comfort is somehow transmitted also to Jamie, who finally finds the courage to ask Brandon a very personal and life-altering question.

They didn’t exchange a single word ever since, until the very end of the bath time. Jamie had figured that if ever, now his guest was really too exhausted for talking. And not just physically, but also with all the emotions and the painful, embarrassing experiences he had just been through. 

And that was alright. Somehow they didn’t need the words to communicate this time around.

Jamie gave it his best to make the man feel appreciated and beautiful instead of worthless and pathetic. He let him choose a shower gel between the two that Jamie had kept in his bathroom cabinet (the man indicated his choice by pointing with his finger to the one whose scent he liked better) and afterwards, patiently kneeling by the bathtub, he proceeded to wash the man with a sponge. 

He did it carefully, gently, respectfully, with tender massaging movements intended to bring ease to that tormented body under that tense skin. Jamie wanted it to feel like washing away the pain, quite literally.

The man wouldn’t look at him. Instead, with his head down, he was intensely gazing at the water, so Jamie wouldn’t know if he enjoyed the bath or if he kept wishing it had already been over. Jamie suspected it was something in between, something still rather along the lines of indifference. That being said, the man didn’t look like he was going to protest against anything he didn’t like either, even if there was a horror going on inside him. Which was why every time Jamie approached with the sponge a more sensitive or a more private place, such as the belly, the lower back or the groin area, he made sure to ask if his companion was fine with it, if it was okay for Jamie to touch him there. But on every such occasion the man would only give a casual nod.

So Jamie tried really hard. He purged his mind of any self-centered thoughts, his soul of any emotions concerning his own attitude towards the situation, of all the anxiety about the uncertain and unknown. 

The only thing that had been left, the only one that Jamie had allowed himself to feel and to process, was an utter and total compassion, the desire to help and to be of use, not to be defeated by the terror of all this. 

He was being scrupulous, but in a natural, spontaneous way. He didn’t leave out any nook or cranny, taking care of the man’s body down to the smallest details. The fingertips, the toes, the tiny precious dents and curves behind the ankles, knees and elbows. Nothing ended up neglected. Jamie saw everything and cherished it all, every single bit of him. He just wanted the man to know: he was a wonder. A miracle. It may have taken some scratching and scrubbing every now and then, but the dirt would always eventually give up and come off, revealing him in his essence, himself as he really was. Pure and true and precious, with nothing to hide. 

When they were finished, Jamie helped the man out of the bathtub. He held him firmly and close to his own body, patiently waiting for him to gather the strength necessary first to get up, then to lift a leg out of the bath and land the foot on the towel, and then to repeat the process with the other leg. 

Himself already so wet that he was almost soaking, dark brown hair beginning to curl by his jaw line, Jamie observed with plenty of satisfaction that the man now seemed much better, so much stronger than just a few minutes before.

Jamie dried him with a towel, again with a possibly just right balance of energy and respect in his movements. Then he wrapped his own dark blue bathrobe around the guest; he rubbed a little against the man’s now more relaxed shoulders and back to prevent him from losing the warm sensation that the water had been giving him until now. 

Afterwards, he led the man back to the living room, resting him once more against his own shoulder. 

He had him seated on the couch, covered him with a blanked, grabbed a Pleakley to play a hot water bottle on his lap (luckily, this time the man didn’t object to having a cat purring by his legs), and made sure he did absolutely everything for his guest to make him feel safe and cozy. Interestingly, this time it was the man himself that asked Jamie first to make him some hot tea; Jamie was going to get him one anyway, but the sheer fact that the man had taken any initiative, that he had voiced his own needs in any form, was noteworthy.

And then, sipping slowly on the tea, and even going as far as to stroke gently the head of the cat fawning up on him on his lap, the man surprisingly opened his mouth yet again, this time with a single word only.

“Why?”

He obviously wasn’t used to talking even on his own behalf, much less being the one interested enough in the communication process to ask anybody else about anything. That was a probable reason for his questions being roughly as articulate as anything else he had so far managed to utter. 

Jamie smiled half-consciously.

“Why what? Why didn’t I kick you out of here, all freezing and out on your feet? As in, why didn’t I let you die there?”, he asked back with a slightly amused tone.

But the man nodded his head rather seriously, his beautiful jade eyes peering at Jamie attentively and inquisitively for the first time that day, or perhaps for the first time ever. 

“Yes, among other things.”

Jamie’s smile didn’t fade away, but it changed from an amused one into another smile of worry and compassion.

“I just don’t want anything bad to happen to you, you see… I want to help you, you’re… I mean you are…” Jamie sighed and gave himself a few seconds to reconsider how to put into words that very sensitive matter he was trying to explain to the man. “I can tell how much you’re suffering. I could tell that the other day, too. Whatever it is you’re going through right now, and no matter what you yourself are thinking about it, I just want you to know you didn’t deserve it. Right? I don’t know what it is, but I do want to help.”

Just like back in the bathroom, the man laughed with that hauntingly self-loathing, bitter laughter. He hunched as if he wanted to hide beneath his own shoulders as he spat out the faithless words:

“I think it’s better if you don’t know.”

Jamie fixed his azure stare upon the man’s dusky eyes. It remained a steady, reassuring gaze.

“I’m not here to judge you. And all I need to know is that nobody deserves to suffer like that.” Then he rested his hands upon the man’s shoulders, gently rubbing with his fingers against the man’s gown-covered skin, calling out for his attention. 

He pondered for a while, trying to figure out most practical and most accurate things to say at the moment. “Look… Now, I need you to tell me how I can help you. Let me see, um, yes, maybe let’s start with this one. Do you have a place to stay?”

For a few seconds, the man silently deliberated over his answer, a task which took him slightly too long for a question as simple as that.

“Yeah”, he uttered finally, only to have a change of opinion right after his voice had resounded all through the space of Jamie’s living room. “No. No, actually I don’t.”

Jamie didn’t dig any deeper. Not that it was of any concern to him, or made him any difference.

“Alright”, he simply nodded. “For now you can stay at my place. And please, at least for today, don’t think about that anymore. Starting tomorrow we’ll go looking for an apartment or something, but right now let’s just rest.” He breathed out deeply, somewhat satisfied that at least this one urgent matter now seemed settled. 

Taking another sip of tea, the man showed his approval with a slight nod of his head, as eloquent as ever. 

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”, Jamie asked him again after a few second long string of silence.

His guest closed his eyes, looking too tired to even keep watching the world around him.

“No… Right now I’m fine, I guess. Thanks.”

Jamie gently traced the grayish contours of the man’s face and shoulder line with his eyes, his concern now all back, snapping and clawing deep inside his mind. The fact that the man seemed much better certainly didn’t mean that he was all good now – actually, all that it meant was that before he’d really been a disaster.

“Sure, it’ll be okay, it really will”, he managed to reply optimistically nonetheless. He hesitated for a moment before proceeding to the core – and difficult – part of his current plan. “Listen, you’re so exhausted, you really have to eat something now. I realize you probably feel too sick just now to even think about eating, but still, if that’s the case, then why don’t you just tell me if there’s something you think you could perhaps tolerate?”

In accordance with Jamie’s gloomy preconception, the man didn’t exactly look excited about the idea.

“I don’t know”, he shrugged, but just as Jamie was about to start cursing over the man’s cooperativeness, he managed to add: “Have you got some liquid stuff?”

Jamie sighed with relief. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

“Well, some frozen soups, I guess… nothing fancy, but hey, at least it’s always this one rank above the instants, right?”, he chuckled gleefully as he leant towards he man once more to fix his blanket. “You see, I can imagine how just thinking about food could make you sick in the stomach right now, but trust me, you’ll be feeling that much better after you’ve had some. That’s guaranteed”, he explained in an encouraging tone, sending to the man another one of his warmest, comforting looks straight in the eyes. 

The man replied with yet another affirmative nod. 

“Alright, but make sure you blend it”, he put forward a condition, followed by a slight, almost innocent smile.

Jamie’s heart stopped beating for a moment. That man was so gorgeous when he was smiling. He was simply so… there was something so heart-warming about him, so kind and refined at the same time. Just by seeing him like that, Jamie found it hard to breathe.

“Alright, I guess I shouldn’t judge your tastes”, he remarked, laughing cheerfully, as if a big burden had been relieved from his heart.

Then he got up, passed by the radio to replay the stopped record of Leonard Cohen, and he disappeared in the kitchen annex, humming the lyrics to the song that was currently floating in the air.

And he almost dropped the soup package to the floor when he realized what the words that had just escaped his own mouth were.

_I loved you for a long, long time  
I know this love is real  
It don’t matter how it all went wrong  
That don’t change the way I feel  
And I can’t believe that time’s  
Gonna heal this wound I’m speaking of  
There ain’t no cure  
There ain’t no cure  
There ain’t no cure for love_

Shivers hit his spine mercilessly as Jamie realized that for the first time in years he wasn’t thinking about Jessie while listening to this song. And yet, no earlier than a few days before he had so strongly believed that it would always remain the case.

Suddenly remembering himself, Jamie shook off the daydreaming and quickly finished the first meal preparation phase. With water now boiling and the ingredients added, Jamie had now some fifteen minutes to spare. He could get back and check upon his guest.

As for the guest, he wasn’t asleep, which Jamie could tell by Pleakley’s purring, audible also in the kitchen annex; indeed, his feline was clearly taking advantage of the visitor, enjoying the pats and ear scratches to the fullest. 

Just before he entered the living room, Jamie hesitated and eventually ended up lurking in the doorway instead.

He found himself suddenly overwhelmed with that fidgety feeling, nervous and shy like a high school boy just about to ask out for a date someone he really liked. 

It all seemed so unreal, this beautiful man right beside him, playing there with Jamie’s cat, sitting on Jamie’s couch in Jamie’s bathrobe, waiting for the meal that Jamie would prepare for him. Just when Jamie was thinking it had all been a dream and that he had lost him forever, he suddenly reappeared, somehow trusting and allowing Jamie to come close to him, like a completely different person. Jamie couldn’t tell if it was really happening or if it was just his fantasy, but if it was the latter, he felt he would refuse to find a way out of it.

Which was why the question that Jamie was currently revolving in his mind had got him so sheepish. It was something very trivial to a rather comical point, given the fact that they had spent some time with each other now and it was really absurd that Jamie should still have to ask the man about something so basic. And yet, what if the man said no? Jamie wasn’t sure if he really could take the illusion-shattering rejection at this very moment.

But when he finally felt the man’s questioning gaze upon himself, he knew he couldn’t wait any longer. If he was ever to ask him, he had to do it now.

“Um…” He started off brilliantly, with a stammer. Now he genuinely couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. “I… well, um… I guess it may sound sort of silly…” Why didn’t anyone ever tell him how great a marketing specialist he would make? “…but, well… I haven’t even asked your name yet…” Just asking finally this unbelievable question made him so exhausted that he felt too tired to wait for an answer. (Or maybe he was just too scared to hear it.)

The man raised his eyebrow. It was difficult to tell if that was a gesture of amusement or exasperation, but at least he didn’t seem angry. Or offended.

“Brandon”, he murmured matter-of-factly, with no observable implications that Jamie’s very personal question had affected him in any way. “My name is Brandon”, he repeated, as if to make sure if the visibly agitated Jamie got that part correct.

Having processed in his own head the man’s voice and everything he had uttered, Jamie inhaled deeply, now finally at ease. A solaced smile crossed his lips.

“Nice to meet you, Brandon”, he replied, suddenly very proud to be able to finally say those words. Then he swallowed and held his own voice in for a little longer before he found in himself the courage to add: “It’s a really nice name”. 

He nodded and smiled once again, embracing the man… no, Brandon, with his thoughtful, adoring stare. 

So his name was Brandon. That was who he was. Brandon.

And out of the blue, everything seemed to be in the right place, in the right time, soft and clear in this brand new light.


	7. Pour some misery down on me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brandon stays for a few days at Jamie's place and things seem to go quite smoothly, until Jamie starts with his questions and confessions all over again.

The days that followed turned out surprisingly nice and cozy. Brandon seemed to be so much at peace now, both with himself and with other living creatures around him – meaning Jamie, the cats and the hamsters. Not that Brandon had become in any way open, emotional or anything, but in this quiet tolerance of the presence of another human being Jamie sensed a very deep, very touching display of trust. And as for himself, he pledged to give it his all not to betray that trust. 

Quite selfishly, and very conceitedly, he wanted Brandon to know that at least he, of all people, could be trusted. 

They spent a few rather enjoyable days in each other’s company. They listened to the music together, had their meals together (even though Brandon always ate so little it started to worry Jamie if he wasn’t a case of some eating disorder), and laying on the bed together they would play with Jamie’s hamsters. 

They also talked – or perhaps, given how uncomfortably silent their first two encounters had been, it should be emphasized that they even had a significant number of quality conversations. As expected, Brandon carefully avoided any personal topics, unwilling to reveal anything substantial about himself. Jamie just went along with it. He focused the conversations on himself, or rather on his job and his patients. He could go at length about that, and it also created a safe space for both of them to share their opinions on any given matter without getting too heated or otherwise involved. Eventually, Jamie too didn’t reveal too much about himself. He couldn’t help the feeling that in fact Brandon would be bored to listen about him, and being the self-centered and self-indulgent himself, Jamie was extremely sensitive to any kind of humiliation resulting from the slightest signals that the person you were trying to confide in wasn’t even half as interested in your story as you yourself.

Anyway, they were having some really good time. Brandon wasn’t as freaked out by Jamie’s closeness anymore, at least not in the physical dimension. They could sit or even lie close together, Jamie could rub his dark brown locks against Brandon’s clear-shaven cheek, or lean his head against his shoulder, or brush Brandon’s open hand with his fingers when passing down a hamster to his guest. Brandon didn’t exactly look crazy about it, or too receptive to it, but at least he didn’t seem appalled by the idea.

Other than that, however, nothing happened. And frankly, Jamie wasn’t even too eager to try. The last time he did, as he still remembered all too clearly, he virtually made Brandon run out of his door. And now to break the spell that was going on between the two of them was the last thing Jamie wanted. However tempting the thought might have been, no kind of kissing, groping or delightful lovemaking was worth taking a chance of driving Brandon away.

The day Brandon came along so unexpectedly, silently begging Jamie to take care of him, Jamie assured him that he didn’t have to worry about a place to stay; that for then, all that Brandon needed to do was focus on recovering and getting back on his feet. Jamie promised him that they would begin an apartment search as soon as the next day. And indeed, when he went to work the day after, he used his breaks to browse through some real estate agencies home pages, just to get a general idea of what was going on at the housing market at the moment. He also picked a handful of daily newspapers from the last few days, which were as always scattered around their hospital office with nobody bothering to dispose of them, and looked through the classified pages, circling those ads that sounded reasonable to him assuming Brandon as the future tenant. 

Which activity seemed rather ridiculous in itself, given that Jamie still had absolutely no idea what Brandon’s circumstances were. So how could he know what kind of apartment would make any match for him? There was no such thing in the world as a generic thirty-something male winding up dehydrated and exhausted at a stranger’s place in a week-old clothes. Jamie wouldn’t be able to help Brandon until he knew at least what it was that had rendered him homeless: was it financial troubles, domestic problems, maybe some kind of illness, mental disease or addiction? It was anyone’s guess, and Jamie was fully aware that he should have asked instead of guessing. He had the right and duty to confront Brandon about that directly, even if that meant the risk of driving Brandon away. And yet, being himself, Jamie indulged in his fantasies of Brandon and of being useful to him. Thus, he kept searching for an apartment for Brandon as if he knew at all what the latter was looking for, or as if he even knew anything about him.

And then, when he got back home that day with quite a pile of information to convey to Brandon, it turned out that Brandon had been waiting for him with groceries bought and simple dinner prepared. He also was the first to suggest they could lie down and give Jamie’s hamsters some love. 

That was it. Jamie couldn’t bring himself to even think about Brandon’s apartment that evening anymore. 

Again, everything was about spell-breaking. Jamie was afraid… no, not really of hurting Brandon’s feelings by implying that he should go now, even though this was what Jamie would choose to believe if only he could. And yet, what Jamie was genuinely afraid of was that Brandon would immediately go along with the suggestion and actually get up and leave, because there really was nothing to keep him with Jamie. That thought already was painful and scary, and Jamie refused to take the risk.

Instead, he wound up borrowing clothes for Brandon from Jessie, his ex-boyfriend (Jessie was a bit larger, so the clothes were too lose, but otherwise Brandon looked perfect), getting him his own shaving kit, his own towel, and all those other little things that were somehow indispensable in everyday life. For Jamie, it was exactly this feeling as when he got himself a new pet and was gradually collecting the necessary items for his new friend to use and enjoy.

Nevertheless, a few days went by, and Brandon still didn’t take up the topic of his permanent residence. Those few days were a kind of euphoric daze to Jamie, but then it started to get too weird even for him. He was still alright with the idea of a stranger sharing his apartment, even though he realized how reckless that was of him to first let Brandon in just like that, and then let him stay on no definite terms. He gave Brandon his spare keys when leaving for work on the first day; when handing Brandon the keys, he himself admitted half-jokingly that Brandon must be thinking that Jamie was the stupidest or most insane person in the world, and Brandon confirmed that the statement did ring true to him. 

And thus, he practically let Brandon do just about anything when Jamie was away at work or anywhere else. He also never asked Brandon for the money for anything, and not that he was incapable of keeping… well, another ‘pet’ for at least some time, but in case of this very special pet…

He figured that he simply wanted to be sure what kind of relationship was going on between them.

It was getting too awkward for him. Too awkward for him to talk to his friends and family and not be able to honestly answer those simple yet pivotal questions such as ‘how’s it going?’ or ‘anything new?’ (apart from Jessie, who out of necessity had known basically all along). Too awkward, because he had no idea what to tell them. I have a man staying at my place. No, he’s not my boyfriend. No, we’re not lovers. I did sleep with him once before, though, but it was kind of, well, let’s just forget it. No, I don’t know who he is or what he’s doing. He seems to be in some serious trouble and he said he had nowhere else to go, so I kind of let him stay. No, I don’t know what kind of trouble that is. He won’t tell me, so I stopped asking. I don’t know when he intends to leave, either. He’s not giving me any money or anything, why should I even ask him to? He’s my guest, after all. Is he dangerous? You mean, like a psychopath, a substance abuser or a cheat out to get his new victim? I don’t know, he doesn’t seem to be, if he wanted to hurt me I guess he would have done that some time ago… and besides, even if he is, so what? After all you can’t predict all the bad things that may happen to you in your life, can you.

What would anyone tell Jamie if he confessed them the truth just like that? Nobody would understand. Nobody would want to understand. And Jamie didn’t need any reasons to feel any more lonely. 

And yet, it was not just awkward. It started to feel as much as uncomfortable, too. With the initial euphoria slowly fading away, Jamie began to see through the self-indulgent noble lies that he fed himself with, all the ideals about unconditionality, selflessness and compassion, about giving without wanting anything in return, the fulfillment of being of use to someone in trouble. Jamie wanted to be an angel, he aspired to be one, but the truth was very different and he couldn’t turn a blind eye to it anymore.

He was no angel. He was just a man. A small, regular man with all regular man’s flaws. He did want… things, in return. He wanted to feel appreciated, and maybe even loved. Maybe that was exactly what he was doing, trying to buy Brandon’s love with his appearances of altruism and self-sacrifice. And at the same time, he also wanted not to feel like a guileless sucker easily being taken advantage of, like someone meant to be taken advantage of.

He seemed really ugly to himself upon realizing all those feelings inside him, but that was who he was. He couldn’t run away from his own truth.

And so he made a heroic decision. One day he pulled himself together and faced Brandon about the apartment issue, straight up.

Or rather, as straight up as Jamie could possibly get, producing something along the lines of “I’ve been thinking that maybe we should start to think about thinking about getting you a place to stay, what do you think?”.

Brandon returned to him one of those blank stares (Jamie always thought of them as a sight equivalent of shoulder-shrugging), before he replied calmly:

“I’d like to stay here a little longer, if I may”. And before Jamie managed to come up with an appropriate response, he added: “Don’t worry, I’ll pay”.

As if I was a fucking hotel, was the thought that crossed Jamie’s mind, but he brushed that away and rendered into a censored version.

“That’s okay, I mean really, this much is still something I can handle. And most of all… you’re in trouble, right?”

Brandon looked at him in that special way again. 

“I do have the money and I’ll pay you back. It’s just that… I’d like to stay here a little longer, that’s all.” 

Maybe it was what he said, and maybe it was something in the way he said it, but whatever it was, it made Jamie’s throat burn.

He leant towards Brandon and put his arms forward in an attempt to wrap them around him. Then he hesitated for a while, anxious if Brandon wouldn’t push him away. But he didn’t, and he showed no signs that he was planning to do, so Jamie gathered up some more courage and clung to Brandon’s shoulder.

“You can stay here as long as you want. It’s not a one-way favor, you know.”

Brandon didn’t seem offended or otherwise uncomfortable with this sudden physical display of affection. Much more than that, he looked startled at what Jamie had just said.

“What do you mean, not a one-way favor?”, he asked in a tone that implied a complete lack of comprehension of that part, as if Jamie had suddenly spoken in an unfamiliar language.

Well, apparently the time for honest explanations had come. That was going to be fun. 

For a moment Jamie buried his face in Brandon’s neck, overcome with that odd mixture of resignation and desperation. All the feelings stirring up in his chest soaked into his breath and all the way up to his vocal chords, petrifying them. 

Then he suddenly experienced the moment of peace, the mad courage of a hopeless man. 

He lifted his gaze to meet Brandon’s eyes, straight and calm, as if he had forgotten what fear was at all. And he even managed to put on a smile, a very natural, very easy one, perhaps even slightly apologetic for the words that were just about to come out of his mouth. 

“I’m lonely, you know? So damn lonely. Lonely to the core. And when you’re here with me, I can forget about that at least for a moment. At least for a moment… I really feel like I matter, like I’m making a difference to someone.” He stopped for a second and laughed shyly, in disbelief that his earnest confession in fact was really so full of pathetic clichés. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to take it too seriously. I mean, I do realize that it’s not for me that you’re here, and that you have no plans that would include me anyhow. You’re just going through a difficult time and have nowhere else to go, right? But that’s really okay with me… Even if you’re here just for a while, just passing by… that’s okay.” Seeing that Brandon didn’t exactly seem aghast or outraged by this unprompted eruption of sincerity, Jamie reached out to put a light touch upon Brandon’s cheek, cold and dry as ever. 

And Brandon simply nodded his head in his typical manner.

“I don’t want to be trouble”, he uttered his catchphrase which Jamie felt he’d heard about a million times before, which made Jamie feel like Brandon hadn’t been listening to his emotional outburst at all. But then Brandon added something that, on the contrary, had Jamie really surprised. “You’re a good person, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.” 

Actually, Jamie wasn’t that sure about the ‘good’ part, but he was absolutely positive that he was a vain person and it showed all too clearly. He could feel his cheeks cover up in flames just by this one nice thing that Brandon had said to him, and even he couldn’t be naïve enough to hope that Brandon wouldn’t notice. Luckily, Brandon didn’t seem bothered by the sight, perhaps too absorbed in his own thoughts to pay attention to the color patterns on Jamie’s face.

“Me, I’m not a good person, you know that? Can you just keep that in mind?”

Jamie shivered on the inside. He wouldn’t tell what he was more anxious about: the fact that Brandon really held himself in such low esteem, or the thought that somewhere, somehow, Brandon might have been right about that part and by rushing into all this without second thoughts, Jamie was doing something foolish to the extremes. 

He swallowed and cleared his throat.

“… I’m not sure if I’m really as good as I’d like to be, or as good as I’d like you to see me.” Slightly against his own unspoken fears haunting him down inside of his mind, he smiled comfortingly, looking straight into Brandon’s eyes. “And as for you, that may be only my idea, but I’ve always thought that bad people don’t worry about others, do they?”, he pointed out with a smile.

Brandon maintained a dry face. 

“Maybe some of us do, sometimes”, he remarked matter-of-factly. Totally endeared and feeling his blood bubbling up in his chest and temples, Jamie gave him another hug.

“Then I must have a thing for this kind of bad guys, you see.” 

Brandon still didn’t push him away, which Jamie interpreted as a glorious sign of him feeling comfortable and at home with Jamie being so close and holding him like that. He did, however, let out a small, tired sigh. 

“I’ve got the money, but I don’t want to come back home. Not yet”, he confessed eventually, and Jamie could tell how much it cost him to reveal even that little of the truth about his life outside Jamie’s apartment. He was still mistrustful. It was as if he still had thought that Jamie would reject him upon learning anything solid about him. Like he expected Jamie to tell him to get out of his apartment if it wasn’t the money that was the problem. Exasperating as he was, Jamie couldn’t help it but find himself falling more and more for this silly little skeptic with his distant private world so cold and unapproachable.

He grabbed Brandon by his hand. He hid the palm of his own beneath those intricate lean fingers, and curled his thumb to rest it against Brandon’s. He felt so safe and connected like he never had before, and hoped for Brandon to feel the same way.

Maybe this could work out, after all…?

Before he knew it, he really was starting to believe in them again. 

“I see. That’s alright. You can stay as long as you want. And it’s not because I’m such a good person or anything. It’s just that you’re making me happy, that’s all.”

Brandon remained silent, but this time Jamie wasn’t discouraged. That wasn’t the awkward silence of distance and misunderstanding. He knew that. He was sure. Everything was about harmony, their minds and hearts meeting halfway by their respective stray roads that they both had been on. Nothing could come between them.

And it didn’t matter what would happen next. They were the right people in the right time and the right place. Jamie was sure, he was so sure about that like he hardly ever would be about anything. 

Yes, the time was right. Exactly. It didn’t matter what would happen next, not anymore. All they had was then and there, and Jamie refused to wait any longer. Then and in that moment they were meant for each other, and that was all that he knew. 

That was when Jamie leant forward to kiss Brandon on the lips, daring to do that for the first time since that night they had spent together. He was carried by the emotion inside him, and wrapped up in the heat of the moment. And just as he would always be almost too cautious and too conscious about the other party’s possible reactions, now it didn’t bother him at all. He was just too certain that it had to be fine. 

He was completely unprepared for Brandon to lean back and turn away his head the very moment their lips touched.

Was it repulsion, or fear, or contempt, or weariness, or all that combined – that Jamie could not tell. And he didn’t care too much about it, either. The humiliation swelling up inside him was already enough to almost make him suffocate.

But what was done was done. Now of all moments, Jamie knew he couldn’t just go back and act like nothing happened. With the bubbles of harmony and illusions of silent understanding now shattered, he had to at least learn the truth for once. He had to hear it out loud, no matter how hard it would be. 

“Look, I… I’m sorry I’m asking you about that, but I think that we should make this one thing clear. You don’t…” He interrupted, shuddered for a while and held his breath before he finally dared to finish his question, which really was much more of a statement. “You don’t want to sleep with me anymore, do you.”

Brandon answered him with a slow, cruelly calm shake of his head. 

“I’m sorry” was all Jamie heard him say. 

Right. So Jamie got what he wanted: the truth. He could feel the flames of tears brimming up his eyes and that was so damn embarrassing. He felt like a little girl in a schoolyard who’d just been told by a boy she liked that she was fat and stupid.

And all this time Brandon had kept that poker face. No traces of emotion or compassion whatsoever. Was that what he meant by referring to himself as the bad guy? Well, he shouldn’t have. That was no big deal, and not his fault in first place. There was nothing wrong with him not feeling the same way as Jamie did about him. Nothing wrong with him not wanting Jamie, nothing wrong with him not… not in love and unaffected by Jamie. He had a right to reject him. An absolute right not to need him. And the awareness of all these rights spiced Jamie’s hurt with a deep, unyielding sense of shame. 

And yet he found it in himself to smile a little, somewhat bashfully. Partially because he didn’t want Brandon to feel so bad because of Jamie’s immature reactions, and partially because he tried to keep at least a symbolic amount of his dignity.

“That’s okay… I mean, we can’t help it, can we”, he remarked in a typical attempt to convince himself of the truth behind his own words rather than conducting a conversation with somebody else. “Thank you for your honesty”, he added a line which seemed like the most appropriate and the least sincere thing to say under the circumstances. And maybe as a protest against it – or maybe because he was seriously disinterested in a follow-up to this dialogue – Brandon consistently ignored anything that Jamie had said. He stayed silent and never even looked at Jamie anymore.

That was when a sharp needle of disappointment piercing right through his brain made Jamie admit that until then, he had actually been counting on Brandon taking back his words – or rather his sentence – in any way possible, or at least showing his appreciation for how bravely Jamie tried to handle his heartbreak. But obviously, nothing like that ever happened. 

Before he knew it, Jamie found himself on the edge of breaking down, right there in front of Brandon. He had to act immediately, before he’d find himself falling down off that terrifying cliff – it was too urgent a matter to think about how to do it in a classy or convincing way. He pumped a few hastened portions of air into his lungs before he was finally able to plaster an outwardly artificial smile to his face.

“I think I’m going to take a bath. I’m kind of tired and tomorrow I’m going to have a day out of hell at work, so I probably should go to bed early.” It didn’t matter that it was half past seven p.m. and that the excuse was too blatant for anyone to buy it. Nothing really mattered anymore, other than the fact that Jamie really had to escape in an instant or he would explode right in front of Brandon.

Or so he thought. But yet, when Brandon turned away and cowered in a really lonely, disheartening manner, Jamie couldn’t just leave him like that. Perhaps he was still clinging to the hope that Brandon might need him by his side, after all. Or maybe it was just that he felt more comfortable as the consoling one rather than the one who needed consolation.

“Everything okay?”, he inquired from behind Brandon’s back. He did feel like a total hypocrite. They both knew that he was the one about to fall apart, and still he was trying to reverse the roles and make it seem like he was more concerned about Brandon than about himself, when it was nothing more than another lie, one as shameless as that smile that he kept pulling.

Brandon didn’t even look his way. He gave Jamie an apparently indifferent nod, all the while too busy rubbing the ears of a nearby cat to pay any more attention to its owner. He had this aura around him with a very clear message saying _see what I meant?_ , and _don’t say I didn’t warn you_.

Well, he had. He was being honest with Jamie, and Jamie couldn’t blame him for telling him the truth. Of course, this didn’t exactly help Jamie feel any better. It was never easy to know that you were the one who fucked yourself up. Or to have nobody else to blame for your own mistakes. 

Anyway, waiting for Brandon to react was of no use. Jamie directed himself towards the bathroom, trying his hardest not to rush, not to run, not to slam the door. He was dead-set on keeping up that funny little game of appearances that nobody could possibly fall for.

Slowly, as if finding a kind of relish in extending his own torture, Jamie closed the bathroom door, locked them from the inside, and walked towards the bathtub to turn on the tap. When the sound of water whooshing became almost too loud for Jamie to hear his own hurt-sick thoughts, this time he reached out to a cabinet and like in some sort of a careful, refined ceremony he took out a fresh towel and a washcloth. 

With both towels in his hands, he knelt down and then cramped his unusually tense body into the corner behind the bathtub and underneath the basin. Carefully and precisely, he pressed the washcloth against his face and gagged his mouth with it. After a while he decided to strengthen the gag by clenching his teeth upon the cloth. Then he folded the other towel a couple of times, until its size was roughly enough to cover up his face. And so he wrapped his face in another number of layers of cloth, holding the towel tight to his mouth and at the same time resting his index finger against his nostrils, until he found it almost impossible to breathe and his hand began to grow numb.

He reached out his free hand to the bathtub as he fortunately remembered to turn the tap out to prevent the water from flooding the bathroom. As the room suddenly grew ominously quiet, he let out tentatively a cough or two to check for the audibility. He was pleased with the results: even with the morbid silence all around him he truly couldn’t hear his own voice.  
Everything seemed fine. Now he could finally let it go.

The moment he allowed himself to lose control, he almost chocked on the washcloth. Compulsive sobs felt like they were going to rip his chest apart, while his body struggled for the air blocked from both the inside and the outside. A stream of tears soaked both towels over just a few seconds, so that Jamie literally felt like he was drowning. It made it difficult to keep the cloths plastered to his face, his skin now all wet and slick, but his arm shoved them onto his mouth relentlessly, like it was an outer force escaping Jamie’s will and command. 

He stayed there for a time that seemed like an eternity. It was almost like he had never been doing anything else nor been anything else before that. Like all that he had ever been was that shivering bundle of soundless painful moans and lavish teardrops mixed with saliva and mucus, dripping down two crumpled towels. 

His eyes were sore and his throat was stinging. His chest was hurting him like it had been severed from the rest of his body along the line of the diaphragm. 

It lasted so long he started to forget what exactly had brought him there in the first place. 

All that he knew what that he was sitting there alone, all on his own at the bottom of that endlessly deep well which he possibly had jumped into at his own wish, unprompted. And now he got what he wanted. He got what he deserved. 

He was crumbling down unheard and unseen, with nobody else to save him and nobody to care.


	8. Gonna rain like this for days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jamie wakes up in the middle of the night to find Brandon somewhat busy. And what's worse, Brandon apparently doesn't like people seeing him busy, so he storms off from the apartment, with Jamie following him in a very clumsy chase.

A few more days passed until that night happened.

When Jamie found himself awoken and alert, the bedroom was hauntingly still. There was hardly a screech to be heard even from the hamster cage, although it was exactly the time for its dwellers to come out and have a blast in their intricate trails and funnels system that their owner had installed for them. 

Everything seemed kind of surreal, somewhat dream-like. Alas, the parching sensation in Jamie’s throat was very real. He was going to come down with a cold, he knew it. Try as he might to deny it, he did realize that probably all that he would have left to do in the morning would be to numb himself with an armory-full of cold medicine and hope it would work.

Rubbing his sleep-sealed eyes, Jamie peeked at his wristwatch. It was half past two a.m. His body felt like it weighed a tone and so for a while he attempted to convince himself that he really didn’t need to get up and have that glass of water. Over the next few minutes, however, his thirst began to resemble a constrictor snake lurking at his neck with a single-minded resolution to strangle him any time now. Slowly, Jamie began to realize that all resistance was futile: his sleepiness and sincere desire for an undisturbed night’s rest would inevitably be overcome with this powerful drive to try and flood the desert inside his throat.

For a couple of seconds more Jamie kept trying to fool himself into believing that maybe if he lay still, he would fall asleep again and spare himself the excruciating effort of getting up and trudging to the kitchen. As expected, the results were null, so in a sudden change of opinion Jamie decided to get over the nuisance as fast as he could and then, having reclaimed his bodily comfort, get back to sleep again. 

Straining himself to overcome his almost-sleepwalking clumsiness, Jamie approached the bedroom door practically without making a sound. There in the living room Brandon was sleeping on the couch – as he always very stubbornly persisted that he would instead of occupying the bedroom and having Jamie sleep on the couch instead – and naturally, Jamie didn’t want to wake him up.

And so Jamie was in it for quite a surprise once he opened up a chink in the doorway.  
Even before he could see anything in the dim light of the living room, one which certainly could not be attributed to the moonlight peering from behind the window shutters, his ears had told him something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Which was a series of muffled frantic sounds that would only make any sense on condition Jamie had still been dreaming.

There was certainly a lot of moans. True, intertwined with some grunts, gasps and husky sighs, and with incessant rhythmical slapping sounds in the background, but there were mostly moans. They were quiet, but still totally excited, grotesquely physiological – and, definitely, produced by a voice that belonged to a woman. Or maybe even women.

Feeling completely in a haze and trying to catch up with the logic of what he was eager to think of as his mind playing tricks on him, Jamie carefully stuck out his head out of the door only to find out that, unfortunately, there was nothing wrong with his senses.

Right at the wall on the opposite side of the bedroom there stood Jamie’s computer-and-paperwork desk. Brandon was sitting there with Jamie’s laptop, his back facing the bedroom door. Jamie had let him use his laptop freely, for ‘whatever Brandon needed’, out of sheer (as Jamie liked to think about himself) hospitability and kindness. Poor Brandon had literally nothing on him when he started to live with Jamie, and ‘nothing’ included also an absolute lack of computer-like devices, so Jamie had been the first – even before Brandon asked for that at all – to offer him that he could use Jamie’s laptop and the internet to check on his email, the news or anything of interest to him. He had even created a separate account on his laptop for Brandon, so that they both could feel comfortable with their privacy mutually respected. Well, now Jamie was sure that Brandon did feel comfortable, taking the ‘anything’ part of Jamie’s permission to the limits.

The laptop screen was blindingly fluorescent in the midnight darkness of the room. Even the margin parts of the screen that Jamie could see, ones not covered by Brandon’s head, unequivocally showed a woman’s naked body in positions for which the only attribute that Jamie could find in his head was ‘gynecological’. And Jamie didn’t even need that to realize what was going on. Brandon was half-laying in that chair, pants down and legs spread wide, his right arm down to the elbow shaking in strong jerking movements, with his forearm hidden before Jamie’s sight somewhere between Brandon’s thighs.

‘Realize’, however, did not necessarily mean ‘understand’. Frankly, it was too much for Jamie to grasp, and he had no idea how to react, other than to withdraw and think over what he had just seen. And he did have a lot to think of, with a zillion thoughts flashing through his head per each breath he took, until he’d almost forget to breathe at all.

No, it was really… It was too much. Literally too much. It was so unexpected, so overwhelming and, most of all, so absurd that Jamie had no idea what to think. Even more than that, he had no idea how he actually felt about it. He had no idea what he felt at all, and that wasn’t something that happened to Jamie very often.

Trying to somehow control the shaking of his hands, Jamie did the only thing that seemed reasonable to him under these unusual circumstances. He retreated into the bedroom. His head was spinning with all the chaos of his thoughts, and those shreds of foreign emotions he had to take some time to identify and manage. 

Why would Brandon watch porn on his computer?

Right, Brandon was an adult, it was his call, and it was none of Jamie’s business. But then again, it was. He was using Jamie’s computer to watch all that… that disgusting stuff. He took advantage of Jamie’s good will, and what if his laptop caught some nasty malware thanks to his roommate being so considerate and all? 

Did he have no shame?

But Jamie wasn’t even sure if he was as agitated about Brandon’s misconduct as he should have been. He wasn’t sure if these thoughts that he had were really his thoughts, and not just something he imagined he should be thinking in such a situation (or he would have imagined if he had ever assumed that such situations may occur). Maybe in fact it was something else concerned him more. 

Something like – why on earth Brandon would watch het porn? Why would he jerk off to tits and vaginas? It made no sense, absolutely no sense, unless…

Unless he wasn’t gay.

Jamie felt the chills taking over all of his body. For a moment it seemed like his whole vision of Brandon, his own little world of assumptions and guesses about that secretive damaged man, fell apart without its most basic foundation. 

If Brandon wasn’t gay, then who the hell was he? 

But not that it should have mattered now. They had had this conversation before, one when Brandon made it clear that he wasn’t interested in Jamie at all. And so it made no difference what Brandon’s reasons were, if he didn’t like guys in general or if it was just Jamie. Jamie really didn’t need to know that much.

And, Jamie had to finally admit, even though the picture that he had just seen was quite gross, it actually had him rather turned on, and this awareness didn’t exactly help him, either. Casting away that twisted and slightly scary desire to swag in there, shut the computer screen down and sit right on Brandon’s lap as if to ask him if he really needed all this with Jamie right beside him, cost Jamie more than he could have ever expected. This fantasy made him twitch the more the more he felt the urge to dash into it and actually do it.

All in all, all it seemed to come down to was that Jamie ended up feeling like a complete idiot.

Still, the worst part, as Jamie soon realized, was only about to come just now. 

He thought that he had closed the door behind him very gently and that it made no noise. Then again, to be honest, amongst all that mayhem of disturbed thoughts Jamie could hardly find any space left for considering anything practical, such as closing the door subtly enough for Brandon not to notice. And inside his head was shouting too loud to allow Jamie to hear any more discreet sounds from the real world. 

So, perhaps what Jamie imagined as a perfectly conducted top-secret special action in the end was more resembling of slamming that unfortunate door.

Anyway, the outcome was that right after Jamie had closed the damn door, he could hear a series of furious and startled _Fuck!_ -s, all breathless, yet painfully audible. Then went the laptop lid closed with an aggressive thud. 

Brandon was clearly agitated, as probably anyone would if they had been caught in such a scene. Still, it didn’t make Jamie feel very good about the circumstances. A moment ago he had thought he was pissed, but now he was just about to start to feel guilty.

“Brandon, I’m sorry”, he began even before he opened the bedroom door yet again. He stuck his head in the doorway, looking for some reasons to get optimistic, but all that he found was Brandon scurrying all over the place trying to get dressed. 

There was no eye contact with him, nor any other kind of contact whatsoever. 

“Brandon, please, I thought you were asleep, I didn’t mean to…” 

The more and more desperate tone in Jamie’s voice had no effect on Brandon. He surely couldn’t care less about whatever Jamie had to say. 

He hurriedly picked up his clothes and rushed to the entrance hall. This really wasn’t getting any better.

“Brandon, wait, I…” Jamie only said these words for the sake of it, because he had realized by now that Brandon wouldn’t listen anyway. 

Eventually, rather than motionlessly watching Brandon dash out of the apartment with his jacket barely on, Jamie turned on the light in the bedroom and, ignoring how dazzled by this sudden brightness his eyes felt, he quickly grabbed a random pair of trousers from the wardrobe. 

Still half-naked and not paying any attention to what he was doing, he put on his shoes and left the apartment, following in Brandon’s footsteps. He didn’t even bother to lock the door, which admittedly wasn’t very wise even – or perhaps especially – this late at night. Then again, he wasn’t going to stay out for too long. He still chose to hope that bringing Brandon back wouldn’t take too long.

And so he ran past the corridor and down the stairs, hardly managing to put on his overcoat in the process. And the truth was that even the chill of a late March night couldn’t reach him. He was too nervous for that. 

He could only catch sight of Brandon by the entrance door of the apartment building. 

With the hood covering his head, Brandon was walking with a steady pace, hunching his shoulders and thrusting his hands deep into his jacket pockets, as if he was trying to look smaller so that nobody could see him. Jamie called out to him by his name again, but Brandon stubbornly ignored him. He looked really determined to walk out of the building, and, as it seemed, out of Jamie’s life.

But that Jamie couldn’t just let him do. He couldn’t stand him slipping away like that, and in that crazy moment that was truly the only thought that he could conceive.

“Brandon, please, don’t do that.” Jamie himself winced at the begging overtones that had begun to take over his voice, but he didn’t really care. He had to take Brandon back home, right now, and that was all that mattered. “Please, can we just talk?” He was almost out of breath, but with the marked difference between his and Brandon’s pace, at least he was finally about to catch up with the runaway. 

Apparently Brandon wasn’t so dead-set on escaping, after all. But that look that he had, one of a cornered animal toyed with by ruthless hunters, only made Jamie’s remorse seem about a hundred times stronger. 

He couldn’t even catch Brandon’s eyes. Or rather, it was Brandon who carefully avoided Jamie’s gaze, distancing himself like Jamie was a total stranger. It was precisely as if those daunting first days of their relationship had returned. Or maybe like those good days they had been having lately never really happened. Anyway, the mere thought of their bond falling apart just like that was sickening, and terrifying. Terrifying to an extent it terrified Jamie how terrifying it was.

And so he kept trying. He had nothing else left to do.

“Brandon, come on, just let me explain, okay? I didn’t want to… I didn’t mean it like that, I’m sorry, you really don’t have to run.”

It was then that Brandon finally stopped. It might have seemed like Jamie’s words finally reached him, but Jamie already knew Brandon too well to fall for the most encouraging option. It was much more likely that Brandon stopped because he had given up on his escape, the way a soldier of an outnumbered troop would surrender to the enemy, rather than the way a catastrophe survivor would welcome the rescue team.

He cowered even more, so that his head almost completely disappeared between his thin, bristle shoulders. His gaze was fixed somewhere on the darkness of the pavement, careful not to catch any sight of Jamie, even though Jamie was so close to him now. 

He was unexplainably scared. His terror and anguish occurred to Jamie the instant he finally put his chase to a halt. It was like that fear had been physically adrift in the air around Brandon. It infected Jamie with an injection of a million needles that broke under his naked skin beneath that slim overcoat, making him feel like he was on the verge of collapsing and suffocating.

Or maybe it was just the freezing cold they both shared.

Somehow it appeared to Jamie that it still was exactly the same cold they shared that single night they made love. Or was it even a correct notion of what they had done? Did it really have anything to do with love?

Something deep inside Jamie kept insisting that it actually did. 

So there was no way he could let Brandon go like that. 

He took a place right in front of Brandon, within an arm’s reach, but he didn’t reach out. He didn’t need Brandon to feel any more trapped than he already was. 

He inhaled deeply and then exhaled, watching blankly as the air before him materialized as grayish whiffs of steam. He asked himself – if he only had this one shot, just one thing to say to get Brandon back or lose him forever, what should he say?

“You don’t have to be ashamed”, before he knew it, Jamie could hear his own voice vibrating in the space around them, transparent, sure and strong. “With me, you never have to be ashamed. You understand that?”

This time, he couldn’t resist. Brandon’s loneliness mixed with his own piercing solitude was getting just a little too hard to bear. He reached out to put his hand on Brandon’s. It was a little damp, perhaps still sweaty, and trembling like a leaf in the wind. He held it and then squeezed it in his own, passing on to Brandon his own shivering and warmth.

Brandon remained motionless and silent. Jamie couldn’t guess if it meant success or failure. If Brandon decided not to run anymore and give into him, or if he gave into him because he had no strength left to run anymore, panic-stricken and utterly wrecked. 

Just because Brandon hadn’t got away, it didn’t mean that he truly did stay with Jamie. 

But then again, was this question really something which could be regarded in terms of a binary value of failure or success? Maybe it simply couldn’t be measured. Maybe Jamie simply had to accept it as it was, unnerving as the uncertainty may have been.

Thus, after what might have been seconds, tens of seconds or maybe even minutes, Jamie pulled Brandon’s hand towards him and simply walked him home. 

“Let’s go home”, he announced in a guileless tone, like nothing had ever gone wrong. “I’ve no idea how can they call this time of year a spring. Don’t know how about you, but this cold is killing me.” And with his torso and arms slowly going numb, he knew very well that it wasn’t exactly an exaggeration. 

Not surprisingly, Brandon showed no resistance. He was just like a wax doll, Jamie could push him and mold him any way he pleased.

And the fact that it was not so because Brandon trusted Jamie so much, but because he was so full of self-loathing and didn’t give a damn what would happen to him, was, frankly, killing Jamie not any less than the cold that was pressing against his skin.


	9. Never gonna stop the rain by complaining

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The night continues back in Jamie's apartment. Brandon insists on sitting on the couch and saying nothing. In the meantime, Jamie begins to make sense of the facts and the truth about The Problem finally begins to dawn on him.

Brandon obediently followed Jamie back home. He didn’t look too rebellious, to put it mildly, but, just in case, Jamie preferred not to let go of his hand until they made it safely into the apartment.

He had Brandon sit on the couch while he himself reluctantly took off his overcoat. The thought of shedding the coat only to reveal a completely naked body underneath felt strangely exhibitionistic, and at the same time embarrassing. Luckily they hadn’t been outside for long, so the exposure to the cold didn’t do too much damage, and with temporary numbness of arms and painful itching of the skin on his chest Jamie knew he still could live. 

He was more concerned about the parching of his throat, which was the reason he woke up in the middle of the night and caused all the subsequent misfortune in the first place. Even back then he had the premonition that he wouldn’t probably get up in the morning in his best shape and totally healthy. Now that the adrenaline was down and the parching reappeared on the stage, it wouldn’t be so surprising if this ended up with something serious, and Jamie really dreaded the thought it could be an upcoming pneumonia. 

And he only had his own stupidity to blame. Brandon didn’t really ask him to chase after him in that cold half-naked, after all.

“I think you should take a warm shower.” So startling among this overwhelming silence that it made Jamie shudder, Brandon’s voice suddenly interrupted Jamie’s musings. 

The thing he had said was so obvious, and yet Jamie couldn’t help his feeling of surprise. A pleasant one. He didn’t expect Brandon to notice he was around, much less to show any concern. 

“Right”, he underscored his reply with a fake shiver before he pulled over a sweatshirt he’d found somewhere in the meantime. “Let me just make us some tea first”, he announced and moved to the kitchen to switch on the pot. “How about you?”, he turned then once more to Brandon, leaning against the kitchen annex frame. “Aren’t you cold?”

Brandon appeared quiet and indifferent, locked up within himself as he always was on those worst days. 

“No, I’m okay. I don’t feel the cold”, he said, and it made Jamie twitch to realize just how much truth there was to those simple words. 

That was because Brandon himself was so cold on the inside, so detached, like he was suffering from an emotional power-cut. The cold couldn’t matter and couldn’t affect him simply because nothing really could.

Interestingly, Jamie wasn’t so sure at the moment if he really felt sorry for him, or if he rather envied him.

“At least you’re safer this way”, he remarked, unconsciously reflecting the doubt in his words. After a while, he put two mugs full of steam-hot tea on the table in front of Brandon. He also got Brandon a blanket and spread it over his lap, just in case (that Brandon didn’t feel the cold didn’t mean that the cold didn’t feel Brandon, to put it more elaborately). Only then did he allow himself to finally move to the bathroom and get to feel some of the warmth that his body craved for so much.

As if the hiss of the water streaming from the taps had been a signal that at last all the inhibitions could be released, Jamie momentarily felt his eyes brim up with tears, overcome with all those mixed emotions. It was like so much had happened that he had a hard time recalling what exactly that was, making sense of the events and their consequences and arranging them in a logical order.

Out there on that stone-cold pavement, in the dim light of a streetlamp, for a moment he really thought he was losing Brandon. But only now did he allow himself to experience that fear to the fullest, as well as the joy and gratitude of the awareness that by a hair’s breadth, yet again Brandon didn’t slip away.

Definitely, Brandon was the ultimate master of getting Jamie all confused. Now that with the streams of hot shower water Jamie’s blood began to run again and brought him back to life, he felt equally hot tears dripping down his face and merge with the rush of the water. And he had no idea what the hell that was why.

Well, at least none other than that reportedly he had always been a crybaby. 

Clutching his fingers on his own shoulders tightly, he tried to release all the tension, all the awkward, unexplainable weirdness of the last hour. He knew that to set free his raging emotions was the only way to regain his composure and clarity of mind, which would in turn allow him to make sense and grasp the meaning of tonight’s scenes.

All these thoughts, fragments of memories and observations were winding and clamoring inside his head. He really was at a loss as to which of them entertain first. 

Leaning against the side of the bathtub, Jamie poured some shower gel on a sponge, blankly staring until the thick creamy fluid overflowed and leaked to the palm of his hand. As he started to massage his cold-numbed body with the pleasantly rough surface of the sponge, the other hand wiping the traces of the last tears off of his face and cheeks, it suddenly dawned on him, or perhaps he just remembered, what his greatest concern was.

Why was Brandon so scared? Why did he freak out like that?

Sure, nobody would have been exactly elated if they had been caught watching porn. Much less if they had been somebody’s guest and their host would see them watching porn on the said host’s computer, naturally without the latter’s permission. Jamie imagined that in such a case it would be natural for the unlucky offender to be dead embarrassed, and/or to go mad in self-defense. And indeed, when Brandon dashed out of the apartment, Jamie was sure that he did that out of fury – that he decided to act enraged and get into the attack mode before Jamie had the chance to do that first. 

Only when Jamie caught up with Brandon in the street did he realize that fury was the last emotion that could have been attributed to Brandon at that time. Instead he was veritably terrified, literally shrinking with terror, and choking on shame – to an extent that Jamie started to feel guilty about his own initial doubt if Brandon was capable of feeling shame at all.

Compassionate as Jamie was towards Brandon about it, he couldn’t help the thought that something was totally off. Why should a person who watched porn feel so ashamed about it, so scared of how the people will judge him about it? Now, Jamie himself didn’t enjoy visual pornography in the least – if anything, he found it disgusting – but from what he knew and had always imagined, porn fans were mostly rather confident about their hobby. They tended to brag about their taste in the genre and discard any opinions that would criticize their choices, or suggest that there could be anything wrong with the movies they watched or with the genre itself. Far from experiencing the fear of being judged by the people of different viewpoints, they were inclined to look down upon those who rejected or simply didn’t like pornography as mere virtue-faking, prude hypocrites. 

Why should someone like that seem so smashed when caught doing what they appreciated so much and with such conviction? Shouldn’t they just deride the person who found them watching porn, laughing it off in case the person in question insisted he had a problem with what he had just discovered?

Jamie bit his lip as the answer spontaneously emerged in his head.

No, they shouldn’t, provided they themselves weren’t as convinced about the superiority or benefits of pornography. Absurd as it may have sounded, perhaps Brandon didn’t really like porn all that much, nor did he think that there was anything all that good about it. If Jamie’s idea was correct, then that would explain why instead of feeling proud about what he was doing, Brandon was humiliated and distressed. It was like he actually expected the bashing and flagellating by someone who had discovered his secret activity unacceptable even to himself.

Once again, a piercing shiver rushed down Jamie’s spine. He suddenly remembered the night they had spent together. All the compulsion, those enforced movements and the consequent indignity of what could have been the sex of their lives. And the sorry, painful state that Brandon had been in when Jamie met him.

Jamie did his best to keep his cool and think rationally about this still very emotional matter to him. As a matter of fact, he was surprised at how well he had managed to bury the unpleasant memory in his subconscious so as not to relive it time and again. Thanks to that, with any more (or perhaps less) luck he would have missed the obvious similarities and priceless feedback from both occurrences. 

Brandon, as he himself would put it, ‘liked sex’. He liked it enough to thrash around gay nightclubs looking for random sex, even though he apparently wasn’t even gay. He liked it enough to sleep with a guy he’d just met and could barely even see, only to decide he never wanted to touch him anymore. He liked it enough to misuse the trust he got from somebody who gave him the roof over his head and told him that he was free to make himself at home. He liked it enough to put himself in the risk of all the strain and embarrassment in case the said misuse of trust had been discovered. 

What on earth was this kind of ‘liking’ that Brandon was willing to pay for with his dignity and self-esteem only to have it satisfied? How on earth could he ‘like’ so much something that brought him little or no pleasure, with possibly some or a lot of self-loathing? 

Jamie combined that with the shady whereabouts of Brandon’s life, his unspecified ‘I-have-a-place-to-stay-but-I-can’t-go-there’ and ‘money-is-not-the-problem’ situations, and the ease with which he seemed to always get into trouble. The single tear that escaped a corner of his eye when Jamie was giving him a bath. The stubbornness with which he emphasized every now and then that he was a bad person and it was a good thing that Jamie knew so little about him.

This rapid, unforeseen grasp of reality almost made Jamie jump out of the bathtub and run back into the living room, wet and naked. He braked by the door, realized that this probably wasn’t the best idea, and besides he was frigging cold without any clothes on after that hot shower. And so he temperately retreated to wipe himself and put on a bathrobe. Still, he was so excited about what he had just discovered that he could barely contain himself. 

To prevent himself from saying or doing something hasty and unwise, Jamie stopped again for a moment after he had left the bathroom to take a few deep breaths. Only then did he raise his gaze to Brandon, who was still seated on the couch where Jamie had left him. And this view was enough to drain all the excitement and impatience out of Jamie’s head in an instant.

This man looked so beaten and so given up, with his lifeless, sightless stare and his expressionless face telling unfailingly that he just didn’t care anymore. Jamie realized that he was just so stupid for even thinking that right now he could conduct any serious conversations with Brandon, much less confront him about anything.

All he could do now was feel sorry for him, for all of his quiet, inert suffering, for his helpless acceptance of the agony so great that Jamie probably couldn’t even come close to imagining it. And he did feel sorry, so much that it seemed to squeeze his heart and block the run of his blood.

Everything else seemed to have ceased to matter right in that moment. Everything that Jamie wished for was to relieve Brandon’s pain, anyway, anyhow.

He did the simplest thing possible, also because throughout his life he’d learnt that the simplest ideas sometimes turned into the most helpful solutions. So he walked towards Brandon, sat beside him on the couch and gave him a tight, warm hug followed by a kiss on the forehead.

Brandon gave him a tired gaze with a hint of surprise, but predominately fatigued, too fatigued to ask about anything. It didn’t bother Jamie. In return he only clutched Brandon closer to him, hiding him within his embrace, offering him cover and protection. 

And Brandon yielded himself to Jamie’s grasp. He clung to him perhaps without much conviction, but more or less trustingly, which had Jamie feel like a great burden let go of his heart.

A long moment of stillness ensued, with Jamie holding Brandon close to him, for the first time in what seemed like an eternity feeling peaceful and, yes, happy. 

“Are you feeling better now?”, he asked finally, caringly brushing Brandon’s ruffled hair back to his temple.

Brandon lifted his head to look at Jamie half-consciously.

“Am I feeling better?”, he repeated the question in an apathetic voice. “Okay, I guess”, he gave a very Brandon-like feedback. Not that this surprised Jamie, but the thought that after all he did end up to be the one to initiate any explanations filled him with a sort of exasperation.

He wrapped his arm around Brandon’s neck and pulled him close so that he could rest his head upon Jamie’s shoulder. He felt very comfortable with the two of them getting so physically intimate without any sexual subtext underneath, and he genuinely hoped that Brandon shared this notion.

“I’m sorry, Brandon”, he whispered, pouring all the soul and sincerity into each sound that he uttered. “I didn’t mean to frighten you”, he decided should be all he had to say about the matter for now.

He did have his own apologies to make, after all. Not because he did something wrong, but because he did something that turned out wrong. And if that was the case, then he could as well apologize. It wouldn’t hurt his pride, and perhaps it would have the very desirable effect of Brandon believing Jamie and opening up to him. 

He looked Brandon straight in the eyes, those inexplicably beautiful eyes of jade, so cloudy and barren, so full of self-doubt and hurt that it was simply unfair. Jamie wanted so bad to take it all away. He wanted Brandon to know that when he looked into his eyes, all that he saw was how gorgeous he was. 

There was no disgust, no condemnation, no outrage or contempt in the way Jamie saw Brandon. There was just the sympathy, admiration, and the unstoppable yearning to have this privilege of being close to him.

But Brandon just nodded his head to accept Jamie’s words, and shortly after he closed his eyes as if he couldn’t stand Jamie’s gaze. Apparently he couldn’t see the way Jamie was looking at him, or maybe he just didn’t believe what he saw. A very discouraging thing to find, especially if you were Jamie.

It seemed that Jamie had a long, steep way up to go before he could win even as much as a pinch of Brandon’s faith. 

And yet, he could feel a new energy fill up his body and soul at the mere thought of the winding road ahead, because now he was sure that he would be fighting a good fight.

Besides, even though it seemed like Brandon had done his thing – that he had disappeared in that dark, lonesome world of his yet again – something was clearly different. He wasn’t as distant and absent anymore, his world of torture didn’t seem that unapproachable. It seemed like on those previous times he would leave Jamie in the middle of some maze and be gone into someplace completely unknown. And now, for once, even though he still was gone, at least this time he had shown Jamie the way to the locked door of that other world where he would leave him.

And Jamie was completely positive that now that he knew where the door was… No, there was no door in any world that could not be opened somehow. Not even in Brandon’s world.

Jamie closed his eyes, too, following in Brandon’s footsteps. He smiled as he felt the cats join in the party, Jumba lying on his lap and Pleakley climbing to Brandon’s side.

He rested his chin against Brandon’s head, enjoying the touch of his soft, well-groomed hair. Brandon’s breath flowing against Jamie’s neck became slower and deeper with each exhale. He must have fallen asleep surprisingly fast. And Jamie too felt his own consciousness fading away.

In the last shards of his being awake, he shook his head in disbelief at all the things that had happened during that night. The flashback now seemed like a dream or some kind of a weird movie. It can’t have been real. There could be nothing more harmonious, in a more right time and a more right place than the two of them cuddling and sharing their sleep in the middle of the night.

It was truly an amazing calm after the storm.


	10. Here comes the rain again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jamie gets out of his way to make Brandon admit his problem and face it, hoping that together they could find a constructive way to help him. Instead, he only forces Brandon's old demons upon both of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took me way too long to write this chapter, so to all you faithful readers who are still out there: thank you so much for staying with us. Every single kudos and comment make my day and light up this otherwise depressing (most of the time) story.  
> I realize that this chapter may be too pessimistic to make an appropriate reading material for the holiday season. I can only hope that Jamie and Brandon will do better next time. And for now, happy holiday, a kiss under a virtual mistletoe from Jamie and a sexy glare from Brandon to all of you.

Very predictably, Jamie woke up to fever chills, with a steam hot forehead and a throat squeezed dry. He could barely stand, much less walk, much less work. For three whole days he was down with a complete physical power-cut. Well, admittedly it served him right for his own stupidity. 

If there was any good aspect to that drama, it was the fact that it encouraged Brandon to show a very sweet side to him, one that he would normally conceal very carefully, but which Jamie somehow had sensed to have always been there. Generous with his time and thoughtful in all his efforts, Brandon took wonderful care of Jamie while the latter was struggling with that atrocious self-inflicted cold. He would wrap Jamie in blankets and make him tea. He would go to the drugstore anytime necessary to supply Jamie’s first aid home kit, and even make sure that Jamie took his medicine punctually and in right doses. He cooked for Jamie, he prepared his baths, pretty much the way Jamie had done for him before, and he didn’t even seem disturbed by the sight of a naked Jamie. (He didn’t wash him, though.) 

On the first day he even called in sick on Jamie’s behalf to Jamie’s workplace, as he himself had noticed that Jamie’s vocal chords were burning and Jamie was too feverish to articulate a single sentence straight. (Of course, after Brandon had done that, Jamie’s coworkers must have gone wild, and the hospital exploded with all the excited gossip. After all, a guy had called at seven in the morning to tell them that Jamie was ‘sick’ and couldn’t go to work. Now that was the news of the year. Naturally, Jamie only realized the mess that Brandon’s call must have caused at his hospital some three days later, when his fever dropped enough to allow him to think at all. Oh well.)

A miraculous change? Not quite. 

Brandon definitely knew how to take care of others. He seemed a very experienced family caregiver: a skillful older brother, or … or maybe even a husband and a father. That revelation gave Jamie some quite extraordinary and complex emotions. While on the one hand it made him feel connected to Brandon so much more and on a deeper level, he also dreaded the thought of whatever could have turned Brandon the way that he was right now.

Whatever could have changed that warm, protective man into a silent wreck he was today on most of his days.

It took some time for Jamie to get better, but fortunately his condition was much less serious than his symptoms initially had suggested. After the weekend he was feeling well enough to go back to work. While busy rebuffing the nosy questions and silly comments from his co-workers (he did realize, however, just how unconvincing he sounded trying to explain that the guy who called them the other day was an old friend of Jamie’s who ‘just happened’ to stay overnight and was there exactly the morning Jamie was ‘too sick’ to go to work… and it was no mystery to anyone concerned, either, that Jamie would likely score the title of the worst liar under the sun), he devoted some time to do his research. 

And he didn’t limit himself to looking through the relevant websites; he also made some investments in the bookstore, and he even went as far as to visit some specialized facilities and institutions to gather the materials and booklets. He also contacted directly one of these institutions on the phone. He explained the situation in very general terms and asked for advice what he should do. 

Of course, he called from his office during the break at work. He would never have the guts to make such a call in Brandon’s presence.

Even with the scarcity of input that he could offer, he still was lucky enough to receive some quality advice. Nevertheless, the bottom line was a very simple and plain one, something that Jamie should have expected all along.

“You can talk to him and try anything you want, but please remember that until he himself admits he’s got a problem, nothing else will work.”

It was something so obvious that it really sounded trivial. And yet, now was the moment for Jamie to recall everything he knew about addictions and how they affected the sufferer and their dearest ones – something he had never really needed to ponder about, because this ordeal had fortunately never affected his family nor any of his closest friends. 

Simply put, Jamie was one of those lucky guys who could say that addictions were something that happened to other people. 

And now he remembered what they would often say about families, partners, intimates of addicts of any type. He remembered the way it sounded inside his head when put together. 

“They become obsessed with this one thing only. They spend all their time and energy controlling the affected person, watching over them, living their lives for them. And they keep thinking. They keep wondering what they could have done better, what they wish they hadn’t done, what they wish they could do. They have been misled into thinking that by devoting their all to that one person and giving up on themselves, they could make it all right. But they can’t. The life of an addict is his or hers to live. The decisions are his or hers to make. For better or worse, the addict is ultimately alone. As we all are.”

As we all are.

Somehow, it struck a deep cord inside Jamie. He was a doctor, after all. He knew something – well, really, a whole lot – about a man’s helplessness against reality, and how you could fool yourself into believing that you could make a difference when in fact no such power had been granted to you. 

And now he suddenly found himself right in the middle of all this happening, himself being apparently the only person close enough to Brandon to try and make a change, even though Brandon was a complete stranger and he still knew next to nothing about him.

Was he capable of bearing this responsibility?

And, even more importantly, was he capable of accepting the fact that ultimately, Brandon was in it alone?

The person that Jamie talked on the phone to told him one more thing that made him a little anxious. “It’s none of my business and it’s okay if you don’t tell me”, she said, “but what exactly is your relationship to the person we’re talking about?”. 

In an instant, Jamie felt very uneasy. It was precisely the kind of question he wanted to avoid. Precisely the reason why nobody close to Jamie had any idea that for almost a month now he had been keeping a total stranger, as his roommate and in his life. _But why would you do that?_ , they would inevitably assault him with their considerate questions. _How do you know you can trust that guy? What does he give you in return? Now Jamie, come on, you can do better than that, you **deserve** better than that! _ Fuck no. Brandon was that one thing that Jamie needed in his life simply desperately. Brandon was just so perfect in his all minor and major imperfections, a fact which nobody among Jamie’s caring friends and family would care or dare to understand.

All the while, his inner romantic introvert kept telling him that he shouldn’t give a fuck about what anyone would say, about the appearances and names and conventionally interpreted facts. What mattered was that he was comfortable with their status and even more importantly, that it allowed Brandon to stay by his side. 

But then, on moments like that conversation, Jamie’s society-conscious self would get aggressive and mute all the other inner voices inside his head. And that was when Jamie remembered how helpless he was, maybe even a little ashamed of what he was doing and how his relationship with Brandon looked. 

Ashamed, because he realized he had no right to say no to Brandon. Saying no would mean he would have to let Brandon go, and that he wasn’t prepared to do. He’d rather beg on his knees, give up on everything and by doing this, buy Brandon into his life. _Don’t do anything, don’t give me anything, just stay here_ , that was Jamie’s message to Brandon. _I have no life, I can’t see myself investing my intimacy again and building a healthy relationship from scratch. Once I gave it all for someone and made that man my everything, but one day he just got up and left. A love like that can’t happen anymore, not to me. I’m tired and void on the inside. I guess I don’t know how to give and take anymore. I just can’t see the point. But I’m also selfish and I want to be needed. And you’ve just happened to be here, just like that, simply needing me. That’s just too easy. I can’t let you go. Maybe we’re headed for a disaster, but still, I can’t._ And that message he was ashamed of, too. And so he went to great lengths to make sure nobody around him, neither his friends nor his family, was able to realize what the situation was. 

Nobody was to know that Jamie kept under his roof a perfect stranger he knew next to nothing about – and the little he knew wasn’t much of a consolation either – just because the guy had asked him to. Nobody was allowed to find out that Jamie got ‘nothing’ for that in return. Not a relationship, not a commitment, not even any dry sex to keep the tension down. 

Nobody needed to know that Jamie was too afraid to ask for anything lest he should scare Brandon away and lose him, even with all the ‘nothing’ he was giving him.

And so it seemed scary and somewhat even humiliating, that mere thought of trying to put it in any definite words what Jamie’s relationship towards Brandon was. Yes, it was a source of some comfort to Jamie that the person he was talking to on that phone wasn’t somebody he knew and so whatever she thought of the two of them made little difference to him. But still, that person could be judgmental. Even if she wouldn’t say that out loud, she would probably think all those things that Jamie didn’t want anyone to think, exactly the reason why he tried to keep Brandon secret from anyone around him.

_What? You have a presumed sex addict staying at your place, just like that? And what do you know about him, again? That he’s a bundle of wrecked nerves, check, that he’s got his own place to stay (or so he says) but still he prefers to live off of you in your cramped apartment, check, that he appears very likely to be a sufferer of an eating disorder, check. Anything else? His history, his job (he certainly doesn’t seem bankrupt, so he must have one, or at least used to have it until very recently), his family situation? Oh, not even his family name? So what you’re saying is basically that you’ve let a completely suspicious stranger stay with you for an indefinite amount of time? You’re letting him stay when you’re away for the work, you’re sleeping wall to wall with him night by night, you’re leaving him at home with your own spare keys every time you go out, great. What about the basics, what about your safety, what about your own spatial and material needs? And he’s not even your lover. You have no imitation of relationship to compensate for all those ridiculous things that you’ve been doing for him. Do you seriously think you can’t do any better? Jamie, you do think that you don’t deserve any better, do you?_

No, I don’t, Jamie repeatedly convinced himself inside his head, his inner romantic forced to get back on track to support the case. There was nothing wrong with him and Brandon, and they didn’t have to have sex to be even more than an imitation of a relationship. What they had may have been unconventional, but at least it was true. They were both crippled and alone, and they needed each other. What else could be there to a relationship? Just because they didn’t go through the usual model of dating, sharing their childhood stories and bringing in the reports on their jobs and families, and moving in no sooner than half a year since they’d met, didn’t make them any worse or less of a relationship. But why Jamie should even bother trying to explain that to anyone? People had their fixed ideas about what a proper relationship should be, as they did about a proper lifestyle and even a proper life as such. Even those kindest people who really meant well. Or rather, especially them. They would literally swamp Jamie with arguments against Brandon and against this shape of their relationship, or likely against their relationship as such, certain that by doing so they would protect Jamie and appeal to his common sense. And they would only end up hurting him instead.

But on the deepest level of honesty, as usual, Jamie had to admit that all this wasn’t the only reason. Or rather, if it had been the only reason, he wouldn’t give a damn, because nothing could convince him that such friendly voices of concern were anything but bullshit. The trouble was that internally, Jamie was scared that somehow, to some extent, in some way, they would be right. After all that Jamie had gone through with the breakup with Jessie, his dreams crushed, his years of absolute commitment all rendered in vain, his self-confidence and his faith that he could bring anything of a value to another person torn to shreds, it may have very well been the truth. 

It may have very well been the case that Jamie found himself attracted to a damaged, dysfunctional man, and ended up sticking with him, because he was so sure that nobody else would ever need anything from him. Simply and brutally put. 

So, coming back to the nice lady from the self-help group who talked to him on the phone, he hesitated for a while, attempting to find the correct (‘proper’) words, such that would be just about enough not to reveal anything while still not sounding rude. He stammered at the fillers he had hardly managed to utter, showing his reluctance to talk about the topic in a way much clearer than any kind of firm assertion could.

“It’s okay”, he heard then the voice on the phone speak to him reassuringly. “Everything’s confidential, but you don’t have to say anything. It’s just that… you see, with a condition like that, it’s so easy to get dragged into that world. Infected, if you prefer. If you’re committed, then it’s impossible not to get hurt by all this, I’m sure that you know it by now, too. Just don’t let it hurt you more than necessary. The addiction is his and not yours. Don’t get co-dependent.” 

Jamie discarded the concern jokingly, trying not to shudder at the ominous sound of the word ‘co-dependent’. In fact, however, he was even slightly amused at how wrong a person he was to warn with such remarks. 

He simply wasn’t the type that could avoid being ‘hurt more than necessary’. Anything he did, he had to take it to extremes.

And now he had this strangest feeling that he had been co-dependent since the very moment he first saw Brandon and refused to let him out of his life like one more random passerby, all reason aside. Co-dependence at first sight, one should say.

Anyway, Jamie was really well-prepared for what he was about to do. He did some serious research: he read a lot, he collected a lot of materials, he took loads of notes and loads of specialist advice, both direct and indirect. And still, he felt really anxious about that talk he was about to have with Brandon. And he was aware that his anxiety in itself wasn’t something to worry about; rather, it showed that for once in his life Jamie was being a realist about the task he was about to approach.

He might have had a very vague idea about Brandon’s problem and its possible causes, but at least he did realize, on an intellectual level, that he was no knight in shiny armor to him. That problem was muddy, and inconceivable, and at times out of this world. Even with all his good will, Jamie had to accept the fact that Brandon’s circumstances, Brandon’s entanglement, Brandon’s pain, all may have been too much for him. And precisely that was what Jamie was so scared of.

Brandon was sitting there on the couch, listening to some music on Jamie’s iPod, totally oblivious to the world around him and to Jamie’s nervousness. Jamie reluctantly reached for a bedroom shelf to grab a file that had been waiting for the right moment for quite a few days now. He sat beside Brandon, for now putting the file on the table, and approached him with a gentle pat on the shoulder.

Brandon looked rather startled, and his expression didn’t change when Jamie started the conversation.

“Look, I know this may not be easy for you, but I’d really like to talk about what happened the other night.”

“What do you mean?”. A perfect surprise rang in Brandon’s husky voice. Jamie let out a tiny sigh. He realized it wouldn’t be easy, but why did it have to be so hard from the get-go?

“About your… well, your nighttime entertainment.” He made an effort to put this as subtly and as un-aggressively as he possibly could, and of course he had had this phrase prepared and revolved in his mind for a thousand times before he actually initiated his talk with Brandon. And yet, he felt compelled to quickly add anything that would prevent Brandon from fleeing the moment Jamie even implied at the topic of their conversation. “But please, promise me that you won’t run away this time. Okay?”

He smiled and tried to sound light-hearted, not to make the atmosphere so grave right from the start. Yet, he found Brandon to be already distancing himself, escaping with his gaze to the wall. A stinging chill reminded Jamie of that lonely silhouette of Brandon as he was rushing into the pitch blackness of the other night, so helpless and so mortified.

“Uh-huh”, Brandon muttered reluctantly, once again letting Jamie know that he wasn’t going to give him an easy ride and a conversation either of them would enjoy. 

“Brandon, I…” Gathering up his confidence and the certainty that he was doing the right thing to do by saying the right thing to say, Jamie caught those evasive eyes of Brandon’s with the warm sincerity of his own stare. “I need you to know that I don’t condemn you for anything I’ve seen. True, I won’t praise you either, I don’t watch that stuff myself, but the thing is that you’re a grown-up man and it’s your own business. You don’t have to be afraid if now I’m looking at you in a different way.”

Brandon remained silent, an audible exhale aside. He nodded while shifting his gaze from the wall to the floor, apparently very careful not to look at Jamie. He seemed like he had wrapped himself in a sound-proof cocoon so that he couldn’t hear Jamie’s words, or be affected even if he did hear them. Jamie could tell how anxious he was that Jamie was about to take on all these things that would inevitably hurt and ridicule him. 

Jamie couldn’t remember ever seeing a man this afraid of other people as Brandon was.

“You’re in so much pain, aren’t you?” Words that hadn’t even been scripted in Jamie’s own scenario of this dialogue suddenly escaped his mouth. They may not have been so straight to the point, but nevertheless they appeared necessary, and more than that, they reflected the exact way that Jamie felt. 

He grabbed Brandon by the hand, Brandon’s dry, cold palm seeming so fragile in spite of its size and the length of his fingers. “Brandon, I really want to help you… if only you could trust me…”

Still, even the kindness of a human touch couldn’t make Brandon any more receptive to whatever Jamie was trying to say.

“I’m sorry”, he sighed, eyes still stuck in front of the sofa rather than embracing Jamie’s face. “I didn’t want to insult you, I just… I just couldn’t sleep that night, and… I’m sorry”, he repeated obstinately, as if anything in Jamie’s words had made it sound like Jamie felt ‘insulted’ or demanded that Brandon should now apologize.

Jamie bit his lips. He had been aware before that this conversation would take loads of patience. He only hadn’t known that it would be this hard, and it was just another reminder.   
He smiled in spite of himself, so as not to make Brandon any more freaked out than he already was.

“That’s okay, Brandon, don’t worry about that, I’m not angry.” The time had come for laying down the matter in no uncertain terms, the only way to counter Brandon’s obvious elusiveness; Jamie inhaled deeply, as if more air in the lungs would give him more strength and energy to survive through whatever he was about to say, and, more importantly, however Brandon could react to that. “Hey, I’m sure you’ll think it’s none of my business”, he began with a wary preface, because with Brandon there was no such thing as too much caution, “but you do live here, so whatever you do, it affects me, too. Plus, I admit that I’ve somehow become involved in all this, so…” Having stated his point as clearly as possible, he tried again to look into Brandon’s eyes. “So, do you have a problem with… this?” 

Even before he said that, Jamie remembered that with such a sensitive question he needed to be as direct, concise and to the point as possible, and the usage of euphemisms and demonstrative pronouns might only draw the two of them away from having a quality exchange of feedback anytime soon. The trouble was that Jamie wasn’t ever a very direct person, especially when it came to delicate matters that might have offended someone he was speaking to. 

Straight talking never came to him naturally, as it didn’t now, either.

As expected, Brandon used Jamie’s obscure expressions to his advantage immediately. Drawing strength from Jamie’s indecisiveness, he looked at Jamie for the first time since the conversation had begun – probably with the most innocent and unaware look that he’d ever given him. 

“A problem? With what?”

Denial was something totally predictable, but only now did Jamie realize the degree to which he might experience it before, if ever, he could negotiate any level of trust and sincerity from Brandon. Yes, this talk was going to be a huge strain on his nerves, for the usually discreet and empathetic partner in a conversation that he was. And he knew that if he didn’t lay all his cards on the table, if he didn’t say the forbidden _p-word_ out loud, there would be no end to Brandon’s skillful evasion. 

So, on the count to five, Jamie finally gave Brandon his answer.

“With pornography. … Or with sex in general.”

In all his naivety, and his very shallow practical experience with denial experts, Jamie couldn’t have imagined how effortlessly Brandon would refute even that open _p-word_ statement.

“What problem?”, he simply asked, and Jamie just played along, convincing himself that he was talking to a child whose all unbelievable questions had to be answered with openness and stoicism. Giving up or losing his temper, the former much more likely in Jamie’s case, wouldn’t solve anything, and Jamie had gone to too great lengths to get to the core of the problem and help Brandon just to put it all to waste right now.

But still, even if Jamie turned out brave enough to say the _p-word_ , he wasn’t brave enough to do the same with the much more brutal _s.a.-phrase_. So, once again he was left with an improvised beating-around-the-bush device.

“The kind of problem when sex doesn’t work for you, because it brings you down instead of bringing you joy, but you feel like you can’t change anything.”

Brandon gave him a bored glance.

“I have no idea what you mean”. At least with that statement Jamie couldn’t disagree: as he admitted self-sarcastically in his own mind, he himself wouldn’t understand what he meant, too. 

Which again came down to the necessity which Jamie dreaded, one which told him to convey his point in a still much more straightforward way. For someone like Jamie it was a horrible trial and error path. Then again, he really was bent on facing it. He kept hoping that ultimately he would be able to cut off Brandon’s denial paths, so that they could talk about this distressful topic like two grown-ups who spoke the same language. 

So, Jamie took a few moments to think his next reply over. He attempted a yet another approach to disable Brandon’s escape routes, one of a gentle, but firm logic.

“Look, you were really upset when I caught you watching that video, right? But I’m sure that you knew that such a thing could happen. You knew that I could be wandering around the house at night. And you were sitting in such a place that I couldn’t not see you if I left the bedroom. So, if you decide to do such risky things even though you’re so ashamed of them, then… then it looks like you can’t control it, don’t you think?”

When Brandon let out an exasperated gasp, Jamie realized that now he had finally made himself clear enough. He could tell it by seeing Brandon change his line of defense from _I don’t know what you mean_ back to the earlier _okay, let’s make a deal, we’ll pretend that you’re simply still pissed, I’m going to say I’m sorry and you’ll just stop talking about it_. For one part, Jamie was kind of amazed at how proficient Brandon was at juggling these techniques; for another, it was almost making him cry.

“I didn’t want to wake you. I thought it was quiet enough.” And he sounded so convinced that Jamie was giving him a late reproach for that incident. It was almost like he believed, or wanted to believe, that it was all there was to Jamie’s intentions. 

Maybe, possibly, the thought of an actual discussion of his issues was the thing Brandon really abhorred the most. 

“Brandon…” Jamie gave himself another few seconds, before the jumping headlines of _fuck you why do I even care_ died down in his head. “That’s not what I’m trying to say, you understand that?”, he repeated with an incessant self-control that only he knew how much it cost him. “I’ve told you so many times already, I’m not angry and it’s not at all about whatever you were doing there with my computer. It’s not about me having a problem with that, and in fact it’s not about me at all. I’m just asking you what kind of influence these things have on your life, because it looks like you can’t control it.”

with a quite new line of defense.

“But I’m fine, you know? I’m fine, you don’t have to worry about me.”

Jamie rubbed his forehead with his fingers. He felt like he had been caught in a chess play against a much more apt and knowledgeable opponent. Sincerely, he had expected many an obstacle in this conversation, but he had no idea it would resemble a guerrilla fight rather than a dialogue. How come he underestimated Brandon that much? 

“Brandon, it’s not an interrogation.” And not an effin battlefield, either. “I want to help you, because it’s difficult for me to watch you suffer. You can trust me, you know that?” He was aware that in fact Brandon didn’t, but he moved his hand to lay it upon Brandon’s shoulder, just to remind him that Jamie stayed close and still nothing bad happened, so there was no reason for Brandon to be afraid any longer. 

Brandon apparently didn’t like what Jamie did and tried to do to him. He turned his head away: an obvious sign of rejection, but at the same time perhaps a symptom of Brandon gradually giving in, running out of ideas on how to ignore Jamie anymore.

“But I’m alright”, he repeated, sending Jamie another one of those quick bland glances. “It’s just that I sometimes get carried away.”

That was one hell of a confession, for Brandon and his confession standards. Jamie tightened his grip on Brandon’s shoulder as if it embodied the chance that he was about to grab.

“And what is it, exactly? What happens when you get carried away?” He asked as gently as he could, but he kept his gaze fixed upon Brandon’s eyes. 

And this time, strangely enough, Brandon seemed to be at a genuine loss. Instead of generating an automatic reply, he actually hesitated at what to say.

“Well… this… this happens”, he emphasized, and as if this answer could not satisfy even himself, he made a pensive look, got engrossed in his thinking, peeked at Jamie, and gave it some more thought before he supplemented his definition: “I get carried away and do all this weird stuff”. 

Okay, _weird stuff_ it was, better any name than none at all. Jamie gave Brandon an understanding nod. 

“Brandon, I…” Jamie felt that the right time had come, that tiny time slot when Brandon seemed receptive and approachable to some extent. If there was any moment to win Brandon’s trust on that evening, the moment was now. “Well, you know… Remember that time when you told me you were a bad person and that I’d better watch out for you? I still can’t agree with that. You’ve been around for quite some time now, and I still haven’t changed my opinion of you. I think you’re a wonderful man and that you deserve the best.” It was too bad that Brandon wasn’t half as moved by Jamie’s words as Jamie himself; in fact, it was hard to say if he was moved at all.

“I don’t think you’re right”, he said in a strangely apologetic, sorry-to-disappoint-you tone, further strengthened by his head hanged low. “I think you just don’t know me. I’m sorry.” 

As usually whenever Brandon apologized, Jamie had little idea of what exactly the apology referred to. It always sounded like a general _I’m sorry that I’m alive_ , and the way it sounded pierced Jamie’s red hot heart with the bitter cold of frustration.

Jamie’s hand released Brandon’s shoulder to walk down his stringy arm and reclaim the palm of his hand. 

“And what would you have to do to make sure that I know you?” The softness of Jamie’s voice contrasted with the tight squeeze he gave upon Brandon’s hand. Brandon shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know. I guess… I suppose I’d have to show you the truth, but…” He interrupted and gave Jamie a look that was very different than before, a watchful and focused one, and Jamie found it scary to admit how delightful it was to have Brandon looking at you in that way. “But I don’t want to.” Having admitted that, Brandon trembled slightly before he confessed hesitantly, as if surprised by his own words, “I like you”.

Jamie could do nothing but shudder back. 

For that one moment, the magic was there. Brandon didn’t mean that in sexual or romantic sense, which Jamie was perfectly aware of, even though he had to remind himself about that inside his head once again, just to remain on the safe side.

Frankly, Jamie felt so excited and so high just by that simple confession that he almost overflowed. And on the opposite side of that unexpected coin, he was so anxious he might do anything to spoil it that for a while it made him literally deaf and mute.

What should he answer to encourage Brandon rather than make him wish he had never said those endearing words? 

“I like you too”, he replied simply after a pause, hoping that the grip of his fingers against Brandon’s would help Brandon understand Jamie’s feelings no worse than any words could. “And it seems to me that you and I see the truth in slightly different ways. You think that the truth is whatever’s the worst part of you, but I can see more, I can see the good and the beautiful about you. And I’m not going to reject it just because…” Uh-oh. The tricky part came without any warning. Jamie got so enthusiastic about his heartfelt confession that he almost blurted out the infamous _s.a.-phrase_ , or the likes. Now he had just a small time window to fit in an acceptable substitute for the _s.a.-phrase_ , or everything would collapse. Or at least that was how Jamie saw it. He swallowed discreetly, trying not to clear his throat in a theatrical manner, before he resumed: “… because you’re not perfect”. Rather satisfied with the outcome of his improvisation, Jamie could now carry on with much more confidence. “Nobody is. And you really don’t have to be perfect. It’s enough that you’re special. It’s absolutely enough.”

And it was that confidence that may have betrayed him. He was absolutely certain that he was delivering an invigorating speech which could cure Brandon’s insecurity like an extra-fast soothing balm. Little did he know that to someone as damaged as Brandon, to someone with perception of self this distorted by guilt and shame, the mere word _special_ sounded more like an insult of the worst kind.

Brandon, however, helpfully informed Jamie about all this as he produced an annoyed gasp and shook his head with all the negativity in the world.

“I don’t want to be special, I want to be normal.” He made it sound almost like it was Jamie’s fault that he wasn’t _normal_ , like it was Jamie and his sick fantasies about specialness that made him so _special_.

And just like that the magic was gone; the priceless, precious moment of connection and trust had sunk indiscernibly into the air. Jamie could wonder about his own ignorance and inconsideration, but there was no point wishing he had another chance to do it right. Time could not be reversed and stupid words could not be taken back.

“But you are special, I mean to me”, he protested in an attempt to undo what he had said and make Brandon understand. All the while, he never let go of Brandon’s hand. He peered into those lonely jade green eyes once more, looking for some faith in exchange for his support. “Anyway, if you in fact like sex, which you say you do, you deserve for it to be pleasure, and not… not compulsion.”

Maybe it was the way Jamie said one graceless thing after another over a very short time, or maybe it was Brandon fed up with listening about Jamie’s case all over again. Whichever it was, now it was too late. It wasn’t just magic that was gone. Brandon was, too. 

“Right. Let’s just not talk about it anymore”, he mumbled, withdrawing his hand from Jamie’s grip to shove it defensively into the pocket of his sweatshirt. Rejected, Jamie tampered for a moment in the air with his suddenly emptied hand before he withdrew it in a gesture of defeat.  
It felt like all the excited energy that Jamie had when initiating this talk had just left him. The dreaded moment to finally give up had just come. There was nothing else left to say, or maybe he just couldn’t imagine what was there possibly left to say, which at the end of the day was one and the same to him. Those minutes he had spent here trying to get Brandon to open up to him and make things clear turned out a failure. Apart from Brandon’s irritation and his own fatigue, Jamie had gained absolutely nothing. 

“Alright, then”, he managed to utter through clenched teeth, his abandoned, restless hand pressed against his own knee. “If that’s what you wish, I’ll respect your decision. We’ll talk again when you’re ready.” He just couldn’t wait to try that conversation again. But he knew they couldn’t avoid trying, not if they wanted to do it right. “But remember, you don’t have to be ashamed, I just want to help you, okay?” He underlined the same old phrase like he was in on autopilot. A jaded voice in the back of his mind reminded him that Brandon didn’t give a shit about all those clichés that he said.

Perhaps he should have been more direct. He shouldn’t have been beating around the bush like that if he wanted to be in any way efficient. But could he really have done any more, any better, being himself and refusing to hurt Brandon? 

Come what may, and what was done was done, but Jamie still couldn’t bring himself to… no, he couldn’t even bear the mere thought of calling Brandon a sex addict out loud, straight into his face.

He got up and looked at the thick file he had left on the table in front of the sofa. There were hundreds of pages: website printouts, book copies, health care brochures. It took him dozens of hours to collect it all, and now it was going to go to waste.

And all he wanted now was just that one glimmer of hope that all this inept talking wasn’t so much in vain, that it was a first step to… really, to anything. Perhaps Brandon wasn’t ready to talk about his problem openly yet, but he might at least appreciate some quality feedback without the strain of it coming from a face to face contact.

Jamie handed the file to Brandon with a smile. At this very second, he was even somewhat proud of himself. He thought he’d have to face a total defeat, and yet now it seemed that there was still a way out of it. 

Just because he didn’t know how to talk to Brandon, it didn’t mean he couldn’t help him. There were so many ways to help a fellow human being, after all.

Brandon did take Jamie’s file in his slender hands, but instead of opening it, he sent Jamie a suspicious glare.

“What’s this?”, he asked bluntly, unwelcomingly. But Jamie wasn’t discouraged. In fact, he smiled like he was pleased with the interest in what he was doing that Brandon had suddenly shown.

“You see, I’ve been wondering for the last couple of days how to help you. I’ve read some informative stuff and collected some materials. I’ve been thinking you might want to take a look at these, too. You could, you know, give it some thought, to see if any of this applies to you, what do you think?” And he opened the file to show Brandon a number of pages. 

First, there was a booklet which provided the basics on what sex addiction was. Then, there followed a self-assessment questionnaire. After that there was quite a lot of other really cool and undoubtedly helpful stuff – which they unfortunately couldn’t look at together, because after seeing the self-diagnosis question list, Brandon abruptly shut the file with a loud thud.

“What the… what do you mean, what the fuck is that?” Panting nervously as if he had to fight for every breath, Brandon put the file back on the table. Then he fled into the kitchen; it was a good question if he didn’t leave the apartment just because he remembered he had given Jamie a word that he wouldn’t, or if there was any other reason to it. 

Again, only when it was too late did Jamie realize that he had made another mistake. And with Brandon, it wasn’t exactly a _better late than never_ kind of _too late_. 

Frightened, although trying not to panic, Jamie rushed to follow in Brandon’s footsteps.  
“Brandon…? I… I’m sorry, that was very tactless of me. Don’t take it so hard, I really want to help you, and not to insult you.” When he entered the kitchen, Brandon was already sitting on a stool with his face plastered to the window. Jamie was dizzy with the reminiscence of all those too familiar moments with Brandon slipping away while all Jamie could do was desperately flap around with his pledges, apologies and promises, the way a drowning man did with his arms in the open sea. 

“Hey, don’t be so upset…” He tried to make it sound like a mild command, but all that it sounded like in his ears was a pathetic howl.

“I told you not to worry about me”, Brandon answered curtly, with those relatively subtle words that most likely meant _I told you to mind your own business_. 

Once more Jamie switched on his autopilot, utterly ignoring and postponing whatever he felt at the moment to focus his all on Brandon and how to get him back. 

He approached Brandon and leant towards him to put the hands on his shoulders. And before he knew it, he was back to the explaining-lecturing mode.

“I really understand that you may be too scared to discuss it with me. It’s a very intimate matter, after all, so it’s natural if you have your doubts. I’ve just been thinking that reading would be good. You could do it all by yourself and consider it just in your own mind if it fits your situation or not.” He made a short break to take a breath, and also because it seemed like he had run out of things to say. Now all that was left to say was to remind Brandon once more not to be so hard on himself and reassure him of Jamie’s incessant acceptance. Which he did. “Don’t condemn yourself, Brandon. What you need right now is help and not criticism. And this includes yourself too, you know?”

But Brandon didn’t seem encouraged nor comforted by Jamie’s words. Typically of himself, he was just tired and resigned. Once more Jamie turned out to be the reason why Brandon ended up that way, and the mere thought hurt.

“Okay, I’ll read it, but next time you stay out of it.”

 _Stay out of it_? But Jamie thought that they were only preparing to get started!

He couldn’t escape it anymore. The scenario he had feared the most collapsed upon him like a heavy brick wall. 

It really was just too much for him. Brandon’s situation and everything related, it was too much. Jamie couldn’t handle it.

Had he really been stupid enough to get this idea that he could do this? That he could just go there, talk to Brandon for a couple of minutes, hand him some papers and just like that, Brandon would be saved?

Did Brandon really need to be saved in first place? And even if he did, could he really be saved just like that by a good-willed stranger who had nothing better to do and knew next to nothing about him?

Was Jamie really such a dumb creature that could think for even a second that he could tackle Brandon’s issues and not be overwhelmed by them? It was something bigger than himself. A world he couldn’t even come close to, a world he couldn’t comprehend. He was weak and ignorant, and powerless. What good could it do for Brandon if Jamie barged into his affairs like that?

If saving Brandon was his responsibility, as he had tended to think all along, then he had it all wrong.

He screwed it, totally.

And it killed him all the more when he remembered that even in this pathetic attempt of a serious conversation there had been moments when he seemed to be quite close. Those few moments when it looked like Brandon was a hair’s breadth away from relaxing and relenting, when it almost seemed like Brandon began to believe in Jamie. If only Jamie had known what to say. Or if only he had known when to stop. 

He had been miserably defeated, virtually crushed, by that cruel enemy he’d completely underestimated, the unholy alliance of Brandon’s addiction and Brandon’s past. 

“I’m so sorry, Brandon.” That was all he could say and he really meant it, as he knelt beside him and held him close. An apology was about the only thing that he could still do, and it hurt like hell to know that to feel sorry for trying to help, for trying to be useful, was the only thing left for him.

He buried his face in Brandon’s arm, fighting back the tears as if he really was the one here who was entitled to any crying. He felt Brandon gently cuddling him back, but even this one sign of acceptance and trust wasn’t now of much consolation to him.

He wrapped his arms around Brandon’s neck, cradling him in his embrace. He planted a kiss on Brandon’s temple, but the warm sensation of his skin against Jamie’s lips surprisingly only made him feel colder. 

He knew they would get through this. He knew that after minutes, quarters or hours had passed like that, it would finally end. They would get up, get back to normal and try to act like nothing ever went wrong. 

But how long could they carry on like this?

Jamie really loathed the upsettingly vivid premonition that Brandon would turn out as yet another thing in his life he just couldn’t do right.


	11. Now that's raining more than ever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For reasons undisclosed to Jamie, Brandon suddenly agrees to move in with him for an undetermined period. With the ghosts of Brandon's recent past lurking around and leaving quite visible stains, what starts off like an exciting venture to collect Brandon's stuff from his place soon turns out to be much more complicated than that.

For a moment after his unsuccessful attempt to get Brandon to talk about his troubled sex life, Jamie was afraid that this time he had really crossed the line, as if it had been this one small step past which there could be no return anymore. Somehow, it occurred to Jamie that so far Brandon had been comfortable by his side exactly because Jamie knew nothing about him and had no means to change his state of zero knowledge; but now that Jamie had begun to think, to sniff around and to dig into the dark matter of Brandon’s circumstances, doing it mostly behind Brandon’s back, Brandon could have very understandably perceived it as an alert, a signal to run and never look back. 

Simply put, Jamie had lost his most important asset: his ignorance, his oblivion of Brandon’s whereabouts. Now things weren’t as convenient for Brandon anymore. Instead of a cozy friendly stranger, now Jamie had become just another person in Brandon’s life. Just another person who had his opinions, who could judge him, and who apparently wanted to fix him. This might not have exactly been a deal that Brandon wanted for himself, and the thought really made Jamie anxious.

Nevertheless, rather surprisingly… nothing much had happened since. Nothing major had changed between them and in their unusual life together. Just like they used to in the days before, they would still play with Jamie’s hamsters lying on the bed together, talk about whatever was going on at Jamie’s work, watch the movies or listen to some music. 

Apparently nothing irreversible had occurred, dramatic as the failed confrontation about Brandon’s presumed addiction may have been. 

Apparently when Brandon said his _Next time stay out of it_ , he meant exactly that. It wasn’t a shutting of the door yet, just a warning. He didn’t want Jamie to meddle with his affairs, and he carried this point across very clear. And Jamie was certainly worried about that obsessive secrecy – but his fear of what may happen if he didn’t respect the borderline drawn by Brandon was much greater.

In his heart of hearts, Jamie knew that it wasn’t really about any respect for Brandon. Selfish, that’s what it was. He simply didn’t want Brandon to get furious or terrified and leave. It wasn’t something that he did for the sake of Brandon, and he did realize that if left to his own devices, Brandon could only have his condition deteriorate. Yet, at least for now, Jamie had found himself strained, both emotionally and mentally. He felt like he couldn’t take the drama anymore and any time soon, so in his naivety he chose to believe that Brandon meant it when he said that he would take care of his issues by himself, and that Jamie would do him a favor by not interfering.

So a few very regular days passed by and just when Jamie’s alertness had turned dormant, Brandon attacked him with a very unexpected line, over a very random coffee at an equally random time of a day.

“I think I should be going back to my place. You’ve got your own life and your own problems, and I’ve been around bothering you for too long.”

It was a good thing that Jamie was sitting with his cup of coffee by a kitchen counter and so he couldn’t drop, spill or burn anything. But he truly was taken aghast by the suddenness of these words that he had known all along some day just had to be uttered, even though he wanted so bad to believe they would never have to come around.

But dreams were only dreams, after all. They had it in their nature that they always had to come to an end sometime, leaving you unfulfilled.

Still, Jamie tried to stick to that hope that Brandon’s words were only an expression of politeness, voicing a concern about Jamie’s well-being and not a firm declaration – that Brandon in fact did not want to leave him just yet. 

“I told you before, you can stay here as long as you want”, he replied almost cheerfully. He tried hard not to make it seem like Brandon deciding to move out was a major issue for him, whoever he wanted to fool like that. “If only you feel comfortable being here, you really don’t have to leave.”

But Brandon asserted himself quite decisively.

“It’s just not right, Jamie”, he said in a tone that almost made Jamie’s blood stop running. Luckily, before Jamie’s inner defenses could be shattered, Brandon explained: “You get nothing for all this, and don’t try to tell me it isn’t so. You’re not a charity institution, you know.”

So that’s what it was about? Jamie exhaled with audible relief. Living off of a stranger must have been humiliating for Brandon too, but if he was sincere about this being the reason he felt he had to go, then there were so many ways to make it right.

“You’re right, I’m not, but…” As he spoke, Jami suddenly felt a dry spell piercing his throat. That was because in a way, Brandon was actually wrong. Jamie shook his head and forced himself to smile. “I may not exactly be a charity institution, but if you think that I’ve got my own life, as in anything beside my pets and you…” He broke off and laughed merrily, but Brandon’s tense silence told him that perhaps it wasn’t the most appropriate confession to make just now. Trying to get back on track of their conversation and maybe still reach the goal, which was to somehow convince Brandon to stay, Jamie returned to the point. “Of course, it’s your decision. This place is quite small and you can’t have too much privacy here, so whatever you choose, I’ll understand. I just wanted to say that I’ve really enjoyed our time together here. You really don’t have to leave because of me.”

Jamie wasn’t really sure if there was anything persuasive about his words. What he did know was that at least this time he was sincere. He had laid it on the line in no uncertain terms. He didn’t hide anything from Brandon, and now the move was Brandon’s to make.

Brandon pondered for a while, and for some reason Jamie was sure that he was thinking up a way of formulating a polite refusal, although polite refusals were not Brandon’s strongest suit at all, to put it mildly. And indeed, when Brandon spoke, it had little to do with a refusal, and perhaps only a little more with politeness.

“If that’s what you say, then… then maybe we could stop by my place? I would grab some clothes and some other stuff I need.”

For a moment Jamie was speechless, in absolute awe at the unexpected turning point – and at what he had just heard. Was it really Brandon announcing that he was moving in? As in, officially?

Immediately, he told himself to calm down. He couldn’t get too excited and make too big a deal out of it, or else Brandon would conclude that Jamie treated his words like some sort of declaration of commitment and freak out. It was best to refrain from giving Brandon bear hugs of ecstasy or even jumping for joy. Tranquility and composure, that was the key. Tranquility and composure.

He gave Brandon an energetic nod and a welcoming smile, proud of his master spy abilities of concealing his true feelings, while completely unaware of how broadly he was grinning and that if Brandon had been about to freak out, he would have done by now.

“Sure, that’s a great idea, let’s go! We could go right away, if you want to.”

Understandably startled and slightly flustered, Brandon glanced at Jamie briefly.

“Well, we could… if you want.” There was something more to that than mere confusion at Jamie’s sudden zest; Jamie recognized that by the hesitant pause that followed. “It’s just that… you know, I haven’t cleaned that place up for quite some time now, so… so just don’t expect anything special.” 

So that’s what it was. Brandon must have left his apartment in a hurry, as it was, whatever had happened there or whatever had been going on there. And now he chopped his lines word by word, as if he wanted to tell Jamie _I don’t want you to see any of these, you already know me much better than I would ever let you if I had my way_. 

Like his apartment was another of his secrets that he thought could reveal how really _bad_ or _ugly_ he was. 

Then again, if Brandon had really wanted to keep Jamie away from that part of his life, he would have said so explicitly: _no, you don’t have to come with me, I’ll be fine on my own_. There wouldn’t have been anything rejecting or insulting about it, and Jamie would really have been alright with that. But Brandon did not choose to go alone. He chose to let Jamie come along. He chose to allow Jamie to see another part of him that he normally wished to keep away from the people’s eyes.

Perhaps Jamie again was getting carried away, but he perceived this as a display of trust on Brandon’s part, one which he was really moved by.

“Come on, it’s enough that you’re doing the cleaning here at my place. Without you it would be a total pigsty.” 

Brandon rolled his eyes. “No, it wouldn’t.”

Jamie laughed cheerfully. “Okay, then a hamster-sty, perhaps?” He brushed Brandon’s arm gently, before he wrapped his fingers around Brandon’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about me”, he insisted, his tone back to serious and solemn. “Really, don’t”, he emphasized like he was trying to convince Brandon that he would never regret letting Jamie in, in every possible way. 

Apparently it didn’t take so much to persuade Brandon about that, because without further ado they set out for Brandon’s apartment. 

It turned out, perhaps not very surprisingly, that Brandon lived in a rather fancy apartment complex in a very good spot: a nice glass-covered building with everything one needed for a living right in the immediate neighborhood, and a metro station literally two steps away. 

The environment appeared rather posh and high-profile, and for some reason it suited Brandon a lot. He must have missed this place while he was staying with Jamie in that cozy, quiet low-storey block. 

As they were approaching the place through the stylishly furnished hallway that resembled more of a hotel than anyone’s residence, however, Brandon would become more and more quiet, more and more distant. He clearly didn’t rejoice in the thought of re-entering his apartment, and only now did Jamie begin to shudder at the thought of how painful were the memories that Brandon had left there, past that threshold. 

He got that notion that he was about to witness something terrifying, something very dark and, at the same time, very personal to Brandon. 

At the same time, he suddenly felt honored and grateful towards Brandon for letting him in, physically and metaphorically – for letting him see those parts of Brandon’s life that Brandon had so stubbornly kept to himself for those past few weeks.

They entered the elevator and reached the fifteenth floor, all the while both immersed in thick silence. Brandon was keeping to himself a little bit more than usual, and Jamie couldn’t tell if it was because Brandon was so nervous or because he was so engulfed in his own distressful thoughts and haunting memories, whatever they might have been, that he could hardly notice anything around him. Anyway, there he was gone again in his lonely private world. Jamie wished he knew how to relieve that burden, how to make Brandon see he wasn’t alone anymore. 

Or maybe it was more selfish than that. Maybe he simply wished Brandon would notice he even was around. 

After seconds of anticipation which felt like hours, they finally reached the front door of Brandon’s one-bedroom place. Brandon let Jamie in first, and before he closed the door and turned on the lights, Jamie already was breath-taken, amazed at the enchanting view from the large, almost wall-size windows right on the opposite side of the entrance. He immediately approached that spot, hardly had he taken off his shoes.

The diamond-blinding night lights of Manhattan. The firefly glitter of Kips Bay with a mysterious indigo shimmer of what had to be East River in the background. The beauty was so surreal it almost made Jamie’s soul crush. He felt the sweet rush of adrenaline from his head down to his toes, like it was a love at first sight.

“Wow. From here this city looks so completely different, doesn’t it? It’s like… you really can get the feeling like you’re at the top of the world”, he confessed dreamily, in a slightly talking-to-himself tone. He actually didn’t expect Brandon to give him any answer, so when he heard that glacial voice cut through the air, he was almost surprised.

“Right. The view is very good from here”, Brandon gave his deadpan remark, and Jamie couldn’t help but laugh to himself at how completely oblivious his companion was to the very deep and real impression that the picture from the window had made on him. 

Jamie turned around and only then did he take a better look of the immediate environment. The interior was arranged in a modern style, simple yet refined, all white and steel-cold blue, with completely sterile white walls. There was a neat little kitchen annex to Jamie’s left, and a living room with a sofa, a multi-inch TV set (Jamie had no idea how many inches there were, as he knew next to nothing about such modern housing technicalities – he didn’t even have television at his own place since Jessie had left and taken theirs upon a mutual friendly agreement… but anyway, Brandon’s TV was huge) and an extremely stylish vinyl record player, backed up with a vinyl collection the mere sight of made Jamie’s eyes sparkle. Everything there displayed a perfect order, all symmetrical and aesthetically harmonious; no object seemed to have been thrown anywhere at random. 

Actually, Jamie had suspected for some time now a rather pedantic side to Brandon, seeing how much he cared about keeping things clean and tidy around him – but then this may have also been just a sign of how Brandon restrained himself while living at a stranger’s place, and tried to show some respect to Jamie as the host of his temporary new home (even though Jamie wasn’t the one to care about such down-to-earth matters like keeping his place flawlessly clean all that much). Now Jamie had his confirmation that Brandon was indeed quite a nit-picker, one with a good eye for interior arrangement and beautiful things. The apartment was so well maintained that if it hadn’t been for a thin layer of dust visibly covering the darker pieces of furniture and for that slight stuffed stench typical of an interior the windows and doors in which had never been opened for weeks, you could never recognize it was abandoned. Was that really that ‘mess’ that Brandon was so apologetic about when he had warned Jamie that coming there might not be the best idea? That must have been a joke. 

This place was so Brandon. You could see Brandon, feel Brandon and inhale Brandon with your every look and every step there. It seemed so distant, even though it embraced you all over and was within an arm’s reach. It was so tempting, but so uninviting. It exposed itself for you to admire it, but it stubbornly kept its secrets under the façade of perfection. It was just like Brandon… no, it was Brandon himself.

Jamie couldn’t help his feeling of surprise at how anyone would consciously refuse to live in such a place. But then, knowing now a thing or two about Brandon’s self-loathing, in a strange way he seemed to understand exactly why of all people it had to be Brandon who wouldn’t want to stay there. 

He sent Brandon a sunny smile, leaning against the window and taking a certain pride in the thought of the awe-inspiring nightlife landscape that was just spreading behind his back.

“Your place is really beautiful”, he insisted, this time expressing his amazement in much less original and more readily understandable words. Brandon blinked, looking charmingly embarrassed at the compliment. 

“Uh… thanks”, he muttered, and as if he wanted to quickly change the subject, he added, “Would you like some coffee, while I’m collecting my stuff?”.

Jamie gave him another honest smile. “Sure, I’d love one.” Then he put a few steps forward to approach Brandon. In the back of his mind he remembered that some very serious, unspoken matters must have been at issue here (unless everything really was just about Brandon’s cleanness obsession and him being ashamed to show Jamie that there was dust collected over his furniture… which, given the usual range and seriousness of Brandon’s problems, just didn’t seem convincing), and all the stylish grace of Brandon’s apartment had for a moment distracted him from that awareness. The question that Jamie was about to ask seemed very commonplace, and yet under these specific circumstances it really did matter. He didn’t want to ask it while physically keeping his distance and allowing Brandon to shun away. “Is there something I could do to help you?”

Brandon sighed, visibly uncomfortable at this inquiry. “No, that’s okay. … Just make yourself at home, I’ll be done in a minute”, he announced and turned to his right to prepare some coffee for the two of them. 

The message was more or less clear. _Don’t meddle. Don’t barge in._

Still, something was off. A usual Brandon who wanted Jamie to stay away from his affairs made it clear very firmly, in no uncertain terms. That wasn’t the case now. Was it because during their shared house period Brandon had warmed himself up to Jamie enough to handle him with more gentleness and consideration than he had used to in the beginning? Or was it something else, something precisely about there and then?

What did Brandon want him to do? The uncertainty was unnerving, and yet it was spiced with a sort of excitement at what all this might turn out to be. A part of Jamie’s subconscious was already romanticizing about this being their breakthrough day, with Brandon sharing some darkest secrets and letting Jamie see his true vulnerable side. Naturally, with Jamie unfailingly rushing to Brandon’s rescue and proving him just how worthy he was of Brandon’s trust.

And if he wanted to get Brandon to trust him, it was best not to push at all. For this reason Jamie decided to comply with Brandon’s _don’t meddle_ message, at least for now.

“If that’s what you say, then I’ll just try to stay out of your way”, he promised as he smiled and nodded his head. The room was getting warm, so it was about time to finally take off his dark blue denim jacket. Which he did. 

As he returned to the entrance hall to hang his jacket on a rack, in the corner of his eye Jamie noticed that a door to his right, which seemed like a bathroom door, had been left ajar. And he was absolutely sure that Brandon didn’t go there since they had entered his apartment just a couple of minutes ago. Which meant that the door must have been this way for weeks since Brandon had abandoned this place. 

Even so, there would still be nothing so strange about it. After all, it did seem that Brandon had left his apartment in a hurry, or maybe even not intending to leave it for so long. Brandon did come to Jamie the other day in a totally shattered emergency state, wearing the same clothes for about a week; whatever had happened to him back then, he can’t have been planning to leave his apartment, much less worry about insignificant details such as closing all the doors inside. From the scarce information that Brandon had shared with Jamie, it was obviously not so much of a decision not to go back there, but rather the matter of a feeling that he couldn’t return, or even wasn’t allowed to: Jamie had been even suspecting that there was another party that had their say here, literally someone who kicked Brandon out of the house, but now it turned out that Brandon lived alone. Anyway, for an apartment fled from in such a rush, it was no surprise that some door should have been left opened.

Nevertheless, Jamie had a funny feeling about this particular door. Maybe it was the tension within that he sensed ever since the two of them had set out for this place. Or maybe it was about how unlike Brandon it seemed, with his apparent tidiness obsession, to leave a crack in a door like that – how it just didn’t fit this overall image of completeness and control. 

Anyway, there was something suspicious about it, something even ominous. 

Jamie revolved inside his head for a few seconds how, if at all, he should inquire Brandon about the door. Having made up his mind, he took a deep breath to gather up the energy necessary to say the words, and it was then that a familiar smell struck his nostrils. 

An acrid, nauseating odor that floated in fragmentary whiffs clearly from that crack in the door. A rotten cloud that, once smelt, was hard to bear, but perhaps by most people it wouldn’t have been smelt at all just yet. But Jamie’s case was different. He had to do with this smell every so often at work. He couldn’t avoid it. He was sensitive to it. He couldn’t not identify it. 

It was the smell of old blood. 

Suddenly feeling rather dizzy and getting shaky on the inside, just like someone who had just realized that they were witnessing some kind of crime scene should, Jamie turned to Brandon with a weakened voice.

“I think this place could use some fresh air.” He didn’t know how else he could convey what was on his mind to Brandon to coax an explanation from him rather than bluntly asking about the bathroom or, even worse, forcibly entering it on his own. 

He had to admit it to himself that he was being rather dumb in this attempt. It was Brandon and his master denial he was dealing with, after all. There was no way Brandon would just take a hint and give a straightforward explanation. Actually, if he was ever going to give Jamie such an explanation, he certainly would have done that before. 

“Sure, you’ve got the point. It would be great if you could open the window… right?” Brandon’s reply was indeed very calm, if more than just slightly artificial. He was oblivious to the discovery that Jamie had just made, or at least doing a wonderful job at trying to believe in his own oblivion. 

Jamie inhaled profoundly, focusing on not getting distracted by the disturbing odor. By now he knew that he had to put his own feelings of terror on hold if he wanted to really find out what had happened and at the same time keep his act together. He had to face the fact that this time, again, there would be no partnership from Brandon in any respect. 

With a nervous gulp, he ran his fingers through the chocolate brown waves of his hair. “Right, but first, we’d have to open the bathroom door. … I think it’s the bathroom that needs the air the most.”

He looked Brandon straight in the eye, silently asking for his permission. Brandon’s reaction took Jamie aback: he quivered, hanged his head low, and almost inaudibly muttered: “So you’ve seen it, huh? The bathroom”.

Jamie raised an eyebrow in confusion. What the hell did he mean? They had entered the apartment together, no more than ten minutes before, and Jamie had spent most of that time by the window admiring the Manhattan view. How could Brandon not remember that?

… Could it be that Brandon was so dissociated from reality with whatever was going on inside his head that he had really lost his touch? 

“No, I haven’t. But should I?” He took a step forward towards Brandon. It was about time to directly confront him about the secrets in the bathroom. Besides, Jamie already knew Brandon well enough to see a breakdown coming. He had only two choices now: either to let Brandon drill deeper into his own private space of denial, or to keep pushing into the opposite direction until there was an outburst. He chose the latter, with a faint hope that at least now, being slightly prepared for it, he would know how to control it. 

He placed a hand upon Brandon’s shoulder and squeezed it gently. “Tell me, Brandon… what I smell there, it’s blood, isn’t it?”

If it was control that Jamie wished for, then it was hard to tell if he had succeeded. In a reply to his inquiry, Brandon only cowered, scared and ashamed, like he had already done on those more critical moments, like when Jamie had caught him watching porn, or when he had questioned him about his addiction. 

“Yes, you’re right”, he whispered with that expected immeasurable pain in his voice which had Jamie wondering again just how bad a person he must have been for even asking such things that brought Brandon so much distress. It felt as if Jamie had forced him to admit to having committed some kind of atrocious crime. “Just… don’t go in there, okay? … It’s dirty inside.” 

There he was again. Checking out. Lost in his private world of shame and horror. And now Jamie’s task was to get him back, or at least to stop Brandon drifting away into the whirlpool of fright. 

Given the circumstances, Jamie felt so serene on the inside that it was almost amusing. Perhaps it was the déjà vu of the scene that made him feel more or less in control, while the focus on Brandon helped him repress the most terrifying thought that right behind that door somebody had been violently assaulted or committed suicide. It was almost like Jamie knew what to do. A nice state of mind indeed, for a change.

He embraced Brandon confidently and held him close so that Brandon could feel his body warmth against his own. “Brandon…” He paused, carefully selecting the appropriate words to say, striving to figure out over fragments of seconds what it was that Brandon needed the most at the moment – what kind of reassurance his subconscious yearned for the most. 

He held him even tighter to let him know how protective and nonjudgmental he remained. In his mind he swiftly analyzed the situation and Brandon’s behavior once more. So Brandon was losing it because he didn’t want Jamie to see the bathroom, and because he was so ashamed of the bloody mess that apparently had been left there. Right? And whatever had been the cause of that bloody mess, it must have been a dreadful experience for Brandon, a veritable trauma shaking his sense of security to the ground. And that was exactly it, that was what Jamie had to hold onto. “Brandon, I won’t go anywhere unless you let me, I promise. You’re safe now.” 

However, Jamie’s confidence turned out to be premature, or to put it simply, mere overconfidence. Setting himself loose from Jamie’s embrace, Brandon turned around to lean against the closet, showing Jamie his back in a familiar I can’t hear a word you say manner. Even that closed looked somehow symbolic in this scenery, as if Brandon was clinging to a place where he could hide away.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to see that.” 

Why on earth was he getting so repentant like that again? It certainly wasn’t anything he had done. Jamie hadn’t exactly seen anything yet, and even if he had, for now he was much more concerned about Brandon’s reaction than anything that could be lurking there behind that bathroom wall. But Brandon in all likelihood had failed to notice that. 

He was already gone, so absorbed in his guilt and shame that he wasn’t capable of confronting these feelings with the reality as presented by Jamie. It was as if he was apologizing not for what he had done, but for what he was, the most painful and unfair kind of apology that there could be. 

Jamie trembled upon that realization. 

He wasn’t so sure if what he was doing or saying was right anymore. Now he acted upon his emotions, not upon his comprehension of the situation, as he wrapped his arms around Brandon’s waist and buried his face in the space between his shoulder blades.

“You don’t have to apologize to me for anything. On the contrary, I’m grateful that you brought me here, I… I really appreciate that you trusted me enough to do this.” He rubbed Brandon’s shoulders reassuringly. “And I don’t want to let you down. I’m sure that I can help you. It’s okay, Brandon. Don’t be scared of me. Nothing bad is going on. Nothing”, he repeated as powerfully as he could, trying to reach Brandon in any conceivable way – with his touch, his words and his presence as such.

Nothing worked.

Brandon just nodded absent-mindedly, and from the manner of that nod Jamie could already tell that Brandon still wasn’t back there with him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want that to happen.” Sliding away from Jamie’s embrace, he added: “I should open the window, right?”.

No, nothing was right. Another _sorry_ and Jamie felt himself tiptoeing on the edge of despair.

“Really, please, just don’t apologize”, he pleaded, squeezing Brandon’s arm. By now he knew that Brandon didn’t exactly fancy that touch and the feeling of physical proximity with Jamie, but somehow it was beyond Jamie to stop. It was as if by not touching Brandon he would let him go, literally, and for that he would only have his own self to blame. “You can tell me what happened, you know that”, he tried again, tenderly stroking Brandon’s palm with his own hand.

Not surprisingly, again, Brandon wasn’t interested, not only in confiding in Jamie, but also in taking up the subject in general in any way. This time instead of a nod he shook his head.

“I’ll just open the window”, he repeated stubbornly, this time successfully pulling away from Jamie to finally accomplish the window-opening endeavor with an almost slow-motion trudge. Jamie understood now there was no fighting it: for now it was simply impossible to learn anything constructive from Brandon about that subject, to hear anything that wouldn’t be an apology or a remark about the necessity to open the window.

“Brandon…” At a momentary loss for words, Jamie held his breath and lowered his head regretfully, watching with silent helplessness how Brandon’s slender form cast a lonely silhouette against that dazzlingly beautiful night view of the city, almost grotesque with the vision of a room bathed in blood right behind the wall.

And still, Jamie knew he had to pull himself together. So far Brandon had succeeded in teaching him to take a no for a no: if he didn’t want to talk, even if it was about the most essential key matters, no force in this world could make him do this. All that was left for Jamie, then, was to stay focused and try to make sense of the absurd, preferably by approaching the problem from a different angle. 

“Can I at least help you clean that up?”, he suggested shyly, pointing with his eyes to the bathroom door. 

Brandon sent him a skeptical glance. “I don’t want you to get dirty.” 

Upon hearing such words, the blood in Jamie’s veins started to sizzle like it wanted burn his heart inside out. It certainly wasn’t just about the physical dirt that Brandon was so concerned. It wasn’t just his bathroom that was blood-stained. It was everything about it and around it, whatever it really was, that made Brandon feel dirty, unworthy and ashamed.

_Stay away from me or you’ll end up just like me. And believe me, you don’t want that._

His pain flowed its way into Jamie’s soul and infected it with its grim hopelessness. It was horrifying and heart-wrenching. Helping Brandon now seemed like a matter of survival, if not for Brandon, then for Jamie himself.

Jamie took a deep breath and took another step towards Brandon. “Even if I do, that’s okay. I can always wash myself, you know? And I can wash my clothes, too.” The way he uttered these trivial words somehow made them sound really deep and moving. Or at least Jamie himself could feel them way inwards, straight in his heart, like they really mattered. “It will be okay. I will be okay”, he emphasized as he leant close to his companion. He meant to make it all sound as comforting and secure as it was only possible. 

But Brandon remained un-reactive. He just shrugged his shoulders and reverted his gaze as if to tell Jamie how much he didn’t give a damn anymore: _do whatever you please, why should I even care_. Whatever Jamie said or did, it couldn’t seem to reach Brandon inside that isolated little maze within himself that he yet again had ventured into. 

Jamie decided not to bother anymore. It was as if putting the action on hold and waiting for an explicit yes from Brandon instilled more and more doubts into Jamie regarding whether he really should get involved with this, if it really was any of his business and if whatever he was about to see wasn’t in reality too much for him, just like Brandon himself feared. 

For none of those should have mattered, after all. The only thing that Jamie needed to remember was that not to leave this alone, not to leave _Brandon alone_ , was the right thing to do. So he had to act immediately, before his own fears and concerns would convince him otherwise.

He took a deep breath and held it for a couple of seconds, preparing himself for a paralyzing cloud of rotten stench that hit him the moment he opened that door. He was accustomed to spending a lot of time at work breathing through his mouth or withholding his breath altogether, so that was not much of a problem. Nothing, however, could have prepared him enough for the sight behind that door when he turned on the lights.

The place looked like a slaughterhouse. The cloak of crimson red covered the grayish blue of the floor tiles like a bog, fierily cutting through the sterile white of the wall tiles. A stain of gory maroon that once must have been a white bathroom carpet spread across the room, with brownish tinges spattered also on the surface of the toilet, the cabinet and the bathtub. The sight was so eerie it seemed surreal. And not so because Jamie was unused to seeing so much blood once at a time. It was because he had never seen so much blood in someone’s apartment, and so much blood shed from a human being. 

He had to step back for a moment and lean against the door. He found himself feeling a little sick in his stomach and somewhat giddy. The cold spasm he sensed on his spine, a combination of turbulent emotions and the cold spring wind that poured into the apartment from the windows opened wide, made him shiver to the bone. He tried to block out his imagination, but tears of overwhelming shock still brimmed within his eyes.

Nevertheless, he had to remember himself quickly as, again and unfailingly, he heard Brandon apologize behind his back. And not just once: now Brandon apologized frantically, as always when he got into that _excuse me if I’m alive_ mode, and Jamie somehow pulled himself together at the thought that it was his reaction that induced Brandon’s guilt or made it worse. Whatever had happened here, after all it was Brandon who was the victim, one way or another – and Jamie was but a witness, a helpless and clueless one for now, one that made things worse rather than doing any good, and it was up to him if he still wanted to make that right.

In his heart, Jamie was still feeling more than slightly shaky, looking at Brandon dive into that see of blood like it was his natural environment – like he thought he belonged there. 

As if he was a robot controlled by some independent power, Brandon knelt down right in the centre of the bathroom. Without even changing his clothes or folding up his sleeves, with visibly trembling fingers he grabbed a random amount of paper towels and dampened them under a stream of tap water. He rebuffed Jamie’s “That’s okay, I’ve got this” offer of help by turning his back and starting to wash the wall tiles so eagerly like it was really a matter of something else than just dirt coming off of the surface. Ironically, his shirt quickly gained a few brownish spots from the clotted blood diluted with the water.

Unsure what to do, for a moment Jamie just stood there and silently watched Brandon engaging in his chores. His heart rate was doing funny things to him, now rising to a marathon runner’s level, now dropping, as it seemed, below zero. He was trying hard to make sense of what he was seeing, assuming that some knowledge, or at least an imitation of knowledge, might help him regain his composure. 

Why could there be so much blood in there? If it really had been a crime scene, Jamie imagined that the bathroom wouldn’t have been left just like that for weeks. There would have been some kind of investigation and the place certainly wouldn’t have been simply left as it had been. Or maybe it would? Jamie had no idea about the investigation procedures, so there was no knowledge here that he could draw upon. So, it may have not really been due to any logical reasoning, but it didn’t seem to him like he was looking at a place where somebody had been assaulted or even murdered. There was blood all around, pure blood, nothing else. No obvious traces of violence or a struggle. Rather, it was like… all this blood, splattered all over the place like a wobbly person that had been swaying here and there until they finally came down… – the impression was of a wrist-slitting suicide attempt.

The realization hit Jamie with the strength of a hurricane blast straight into the face. Suddenly his reasoning became blurred and nothing seemed certain anymore. _If Brandon really… then I would have… I should have noticed_ , he tried to tell himself and keep his composure, but he wasn’t sure of anything at all at the moment, like he couldn’t trust his own memory nor his own perceptions of reality.

He stepped towards Brandon and, at first startling him a little with this unexpected move, he folded up a cuff of his sleeve to take a scrutinizing look at his wrist. It was both relieving and embarrassing at the same time to find nothing there, nothing but the familiar, stringy vein under the thin layer of pale skin.

Brandon bitterly laughed Jamie’s panicked gesture off. Jamie shook his head shyly.

“I’m sorry, I was just being stupid… I… you see, I just had to make sure if…” He broke it off and instead gave Brandon’s wrist a soothing stroke with his fingers, before he covered it back up with the sleeve.

Brandon shrugged indifferently, never interrupting his monotonous, goalless rubbing against the already clean cabinet door with the towel.

“You’ve seen it before, haven’t you”, he stated matter-of-factly, pointing with his eyes at the wrist that Jamie had just covered. 

Jamie sighed and moved his hands to Brandon’s tightened shoulders, trying to get him to relax the cramped muscles with a gentle massage. “I’m sorry, Brandon”, he repeated, but this time it wasn’t an apology. It was compassion. “I’m so sorry”, he whispered into his ear, moving his thumbs rhythmically back and forth to the small of Brandon’s back. 

They spent a few moments in silence, the odor of unspoken terror and agony sticking to their bodies as Brandon relentlessly kept fighting against the invisible stains on the cabinet and wall tiles. Jamie took the time to recover the clarity of his thoughts and the strength in his voice, and once he did, he tried again, this time more decisively. 

He grasped Brandon’s hands, thus stopping their movement. He didn’t even attempt to catch Brandon’s eyes, which were steadfastly fixed at his own hands like they were an unexplainable freak of nature. 

“I’ve got this, okay? You can go and pack your things. I’ve got this. Everything’s under control”, declared Jamie as he seized Brandon’s hands to alleviate their trembling. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was saying, but it did seem the right thing to say: to convince Brandon that it was alright, or at least was going to be, and to empower him, even if just a little.

Brandon still wasn’t too eager, but this time somehow he obeyed. Perhaps in this state, in this frame of mind he actually needed anything or anyone at least remotely believable to tell him what to do. 

He hung his head low, like it was too heavy with all the distress. With a gloomy exhale, he got up and lumbered out of the bathroom. Seconds later Jamie could hear the water stream from the kitchen tap. Not surprisingly, Brandon couldn’t stand his hands covered in all this dirt.

Shaking his hand to snap out of the now useless musings, Jamie unbuttoned his shirt, left it on a kitchen shelf, and much more boldly reentered the bathroom. There was work to be done here. Aplenty.


	12. Shadows in the rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Different thoughts are circling inside Jamie's head as he's trying to clean up the mess in Brandon's bathroom, feeling overwhelemed by everything he has seen and everything that has happened. However, when Brandon calls for him, the mood shifts towards an unexpected direction.

Undressed to the undershirt and fighting off the chill that kept creeping into the apartment through the windows open wide, Jamie began by preparing all the equipment he would need for his bathroom cleaning project: cloths, cleansers, detergents, a mop, a load of self-control and a tone of patience.

He stepped back to the hallway to get one final glance of the Augean stables of blood he was about to take on as his personal world-rescuing endeavor. Before he started, he decided to also check on Brandon, something that likely needed a much more urgent attendance on his part than the bathroom as such. 

Brandon was standing motionlessly in the kitchen annex, resting his forehead against the top cabinet right above the sink. His hands were still dripping with water, like he had forgotten to wipe them. 

Jamie stepped beside him, grabbing a cup of coffee – now almost cold – in the process, and traced Brandon’s figure with a concerned look.

“Are you alright? Maybe you should sit down.” He prompted Brandon to take a seat on a stool he had dug out from somewhere, regardless of Brandon’s expected protests that he was alright. Then, Jamie glanced from above at this slouched figure of misery; in the corner of his eye he noticed another cup of coffee, which was waiting there for Brandon. “I think you should get yourself something to calm you down. Coffee might not be the best idea right now.”

He was thinking along the lines of some herbal sedative, or anti-stress pills if Brandon happened to have any. But Brandon only made a quiet statement: “I’ll just have some water. And then I’ll pack my bags”.

Jamie nodded his head understandingly, trying to find the words to say to make things any better. It was no surprise that such words were difficult to figure out. Jamie still had no idea what had happened, other than it was too heavy and too intense for any single pair of shoulders to carry. 

He placed a light touch upon Brandon’s arm. “Whatever happened, I… I’m so sorry, Brandon”, he emphasized once again. “If there’s anything I can do…” He interrupted and instead of finishing the obvious line, he tightened the grip of his hand encouragingly.

Brandon shook his head, then he stood up. “That’s okay”, he insisted, even though it wasn’t, and Jamie was sure he wasn’t the only one to have realized that.

He gave Brandon the warmest smile he could think of, as instead of any more coaxing and negotiating, he responded with a simple, validating “You’re very brave”. Then he reminded Brandon for a millionth time: “If you need anything, you know I’m right here”. After that, he decided to actually let him be. Brandon had been going through some stormy emotions at the moment, obviously, and to leave him alone, until the storm calmed by itself, might have been the best Jamie could do for him right now. Along with taking care of his bathroom, so that nothing could ever physically have to remind Brandon of whatever had happened there.

Rubbing his naked arms energetically to withstand the temporary cold , Jamie returned to the bathroom with its sticky swamp of crimson red. He remembered that it was also the right time to take off his socks, or they would end up like Brandon’s shirt. (It was a good thing that it was just an old, dull striped shirt he had borrowed from Jessie, which was oversized for Brandon’s skinny torso anyway – and not that Jamie felt any remorse for damaging Jessie’s ‘vintage’ outfit, not in the slightest.)

Thus, he entered the bathroom barefoot. It was like plunging into Brandon’s deepest secrets, like diving straight into the darkest sides of human nature. In a sense, it felt exciting, and Jamie felt very ashamed of himself, so disrespectful and inappropriate, the moment he perceived that tingle of thrill deep in his stomach. 

Shaking off these feelings with an icy decisiveness, he focused on his task.

He started with the walls and the furniture, naturally excluding the cabinet, which had already been cleaned to the core. It was surprising, even a little funny, how he didn’t mind the sweetish rotten smell anymore. It was like the moldy cloud of odor had filled his lungs and mixed with his own breaths that he produced, so he couldn’t tell what was on his inside from the air on the outside. In a strange and somewhat unnerving way, Jamie had begun to understand how Brandon could find himself an integral part of this bloody mess, corrupted and impure, just by staying around this environment.

And to think that he still had no idea what on earth had happened here.

He really tried not to ponder about it – because what would be the point if he had made up his mind not to question Brandon about any of this while they were still there? He didn’t want Brandon to spin out of control or to mentally collapse. He only wanted him to collect his stuff and leave this unfortunate place for good. It was too depressing to even attempt to grasp the situation, and slightly too gruesome to try to imagine all the possible scenarios that may have taken place here. 

One single unwanted thought, however, was the scariest of them all.

Maybe in fact what he was dealing with here really surpassed even his imagination, not to mention any ability to control the situation. Maybe it was something too dreadful, too incomprehensible for him to relate to. True, he had had this idea since quite some time now that Brandon’s problems may have been too much for him, something that someone like him couldn’t even begin to handle; but ‘an idea’ was something clearly different from being confronted up close with a sort of unacceptable reality, and this was exactly what Jamie was facing right now. 

Something irreversible had happened in Brandon’s life. Something so intense, so extreme that even thinking about what that might have been almost swept Jamie off of his feet. Who did he think he was, intruding upon that so lightheartedly, so full of himself, so confident that he had all that it took to fix Brandon and Brandon’s life? How could he have been so sure of himself, so positive that even if he couldn’t help – a possibility which actually in all his well-hidden vanity he couldn’t take too seriously – then at least he wouldn’t make things worse? Well, he might have been right on the best track of making things worse by letting Brandon down. Apparently, he succeeded in making Brandon believe that he could make any difference. Only now he had no fucking idea how to keep his own unspoken promise.

He wasn’t the difference-making kind of person to begin with. 

With a heavy sigh, once more he decided to put some more attention into the present scene and leave out anything apart from that which was spreading right before his eyes. With reluctant hands, he lifted the bathroom carpet and placed it in the bathtub. It was difficult to say what color it had been before the ‘accident’ here had happened, but white was an easiest and most plausible bet. Anyway, there was no hope of rescuing it. The shot of blood it had carried was point-blank, nothing else in the room was as dense with the crimson as this one thick layer of fabric. Jamie rinsed it thoroughly with hot tap water not out of hope of ever reclaiming the original color of the carpet, whatever it had been, but to neutralize the stench that radiated from it, which would be helpful as long as the carpet was still in the apartment and not at the garbage dump. 

The horror movie-like scene of blood diluted with water rushing across the bathtub and down the drain looked no less than surreal. 

After that, all that was left was the floor. It took a lot of water and some serious scratching to bring the navy blue tiles back to their navy blue state again, but in the end the efforts worked rather fine. Jamie covered the floor, walls and furniture with another layer of cleanser to get rid of the smell, and that was about it. 

It did take a while, but the place looked now like a perfectly normal bathroom. Apart from the maroon overlay on the carpet spread in the bathtub and the inevitable remnants of odor lingering in the air, there was nothing left to remind of the sinister picture that had ruled the place minutes ago. Now relaxed and even somewhat confident that he could show this room now to Brandon without hesitation, and almost without concern if that would trigger another unstable reaction on Brandon’s part, Jamie sat on the edge of the bathtub and rolled up the legs of his trousers. He was going to wash his feet to remove the smears of blood along with its smell. 

Just as he was enjoying the sensation of warm droplets rubbing against his skin and dripping down his toes, he heard a sudden call from the neighboring room.

“Jamie? Jamie, come here, quickly!”

The impact was such that Jamie almost tripped and slipped on the floor trying to get off of the bathtub immediately. He hadn’t even thought about borrowing anything to wipe his feet, so now he only stopped for a second to dry them with his own socks, and he rushed to his right, into Brandon’s bedroom. His mind was filled with anxiety. He was sure something terrible must have happened if it had made even Brandon call out for him. 

Full with the worst kind of premonitions, Jamie stormed into Brandon’s ice-colored bedroom only to find some kind of an A-list Hollywood star dressing room in there. 

The room was all shirts, just shirts, shirts all over. There were neat piles heaped in a smart business-trip type of suitcase, some more shirt stacks arranged meticulously on the bed with some other shirts proudly spread as if for a display during a fashion show, and yet different rows still hanging in the wardrobe. There were so many sorts of colors, patterns, fabrics. Jamie doubted if he had ever seen so many shirts of such diversity, especially shirts that elegant, any time he had gone to an actual clothes shop… especially as the shops he usually visited weren’t quite from that price range. All those here, they must have been the brands which Jamie had either never heard about, or even if he had, their mere name would make him swoon like at an out-of-this-world phenomenon. 

… Were they all really Brandon’s? 

Brandon was either a fashion designer, a shirt shop owner or anything of the sort, or a total shirt freak. Somehow the latter option seemed most plausible. Normally such a discovery would have made Jamie snort, but since the case was Brandon, the situation struck him as very serious instead. 

Just by involuntarily imagining Brandon wearing any of these made Jamie feel uncomfortably hot, with all the sizzling inside his chest and sudden dryness of his lips. 

Before he could drift away into his fantasies, however, Brandon addressed him with a rather shy: “Look, I’ve got you something”. In his hand he held a hanger with a shirt. Not just any shirt: it was a top-quality, smashingly elegant white and blue checked shirt, the kind that Jamie would most definitely dismiss as ‘overpriced’ had he seen it in a mall, and had such shirts even had any chance to be sold at the malls that Jamie frequented. … Did the label by the collar say ‘Gucci’? Seriously? “It was, um, hanging around in the wardrobe”, Brandon continued casually, oblivious to how much Jamie was awestruck – or maybe even starstruck – by the mere fact that had actually just met someone who kept Gucci shirts in his _private wardrobe_. “Maybe you could try this one on?”

Jamie blinked in a slightly delayed reaction. For a few moments he couldn’t seem to understand that Brandon had just asked him a question. It was all too abstract to grasp. Had someone really just told him to put on a shirt that must have cost half his wage? (In fact it probably didn’t, but that was roughly the kind of image that Jamie had about clothes labeled ‘Gucci’.) 

“What, me? You mean, like, I could…?”, he stammered, and the sound of his confused tone in his ears was accompanied by that hateful sensation of his cheeks burning. When he gathered the courage to look at Brandon and make sure if he was being serious, Brandon’s face expressed genuine puzzlement, something between ‘Should I repeat what I’ve just said?’ and ‘Are you trying to tell me you actually may not like this friggin shirt?’. That was when Jamie realized it wasn’t a good moment for thinking too much. Whatever had gotten into Brandon with this crazy idea, he was clearly just trying to be nice, and possibly also to have some dress-up fun together. It would be inconsiderate and unkind to say no. And so Jamie replied with a hesitant “Okay, I guess…”, as he carefully took the shirt in his hands, wondering if he should have washed his hands with an antiseptic preparation before.

As he plunged his arms into the sleeves of this white-and-blue embodiment of posh, Jamie wondered how Brandon could even start to imagine him wearing his shirts. The very non-Jamie top quality and stylishness of Brandon’s collection aside, their height and body types were too different to as much as even approximate anything resembling a match. Brandon was some five inches taller than Jamie, with those beautiful, long, slender arms. He was also a lot slimmer, so his collar might have been a size or two smaller than Jamie’s. How was this ever going to work? The disproportions between the two of them made Jamie wonder if Brandon was really being nice or if it was the opposite, if he just wanted to improve his own mood by checking out the totally tasteless fish-out-of-water look that Jamie would pull in an ill-matched Gucci shirt. 

Well, sincerely speaking, Jamie would have to admit that it wasn’t just a matter of a wrong size. He had never been the trendy type, to put it mildly. He never paid much attention to what he was wearing. He believed that he did have a sense of style of his own and he tried to stick to it, but there were more important things in the world than completing a perfect heart-throb, season-sensitive outfit. And underneath this apparent disinterest for such shallow matters like fashion and good looks, Jamie hid a great deal of insecurity, a firm conviction that he wasn’t the one to stand in the spotlight and look gorgeous. An inner voice that despised him a lot would never fail to remind him that his version of _flashy_ equaled _silly_ , that he was just a mediocre, not exactly manly guy next door who was better off with all the attention away from him. And at a moment like this, the faithful inner voice returned, reminding him that he could make even a bomb-costly Gucci shirt look cheap.

Engulfed in such blue musings, Jamie ended up completely dissociated from his movements, so that he didn’t even realize the moment when he had the shirt already on, his fingers mechanically buttoning it up. Of course the shirt was too long, but it made a strangely good fit. The space around shoulders and arms was just enough – Brandon’s height was compensated by Jamie’s more muscular frame (heavy lifting of the likes of boxers, Saint Bernards and sheepdogs on a daily basis did its job, after all). As he folded up the cuffs of the obviously too long sleeves, Jamie looked up at Brandon shyly, silently asking if he was making a laughing stock of himself. He made a point not to catch the view in the wardrobe mirror even in the corner of his eye.

Brandon approached him, an unusual gesture that somehow made Jamie feel all the more tense. After all, it wasn’t typical of Brandon to be the one to reduce the distance between the two of them. 

Without a word, he began to fix Jamie’s collar and helped him fold up the cuffs, the movements of his fingers swift and agile, yet gentle. 

Then he suddenly put his hands on Jamie’s shoulders and turned him around so that Jamie had to face the mirror. If so far Jamie had been slightly nervous, then now he simply froze. He was absolutely sure that he didn’t want to see whatever Brandon was seeing, until Brandon spoke to him in a soft, almost tender voice.

“Yep, I was right. It suits you perfectly. Just look at you.”

There was something so uplifting, something so caring about Brandon’s tone that even with all the fluster Jamie couldn’t help but obey. Which he certainly didn’t regret.

What he saw wasn’t a dressed-up pathetic joke, out of place and alone. He saw a handsome young man in a beautiful, classy piece of outfit that made him look really confident and worthwhile. He liked what he saw in the mirror, and to him – to the hermit-like, never-give-a-shit-about-appearances Jamie he had become since Jessie left him – it was like an earnest revelation. 

And more than that, he liked what… who he saw behind that man. You can’t have been so much of a loser after all, if you had a man like that standing by your side, almost holding you in his embrace. Brandon was such a wonderful, inexplicably attractive guy… and he was there for Jamie, he asked him to try this out-of-this-world shirt on to share with Jamie a part of him, and at the same time to make Jamie feel good about himself. 

Out of its narrative this may have seemed like a very simple scene constituted by simple gestures of no deeper meaning, and yet Jamie was moved down to his bones. Something very special was going on between them, and inside Jamie too. 

He wasn’t alone anymore. He was… connected.

For the first time in forever Jamie could send an honest smile to that man in the mirror. The smile stretched way up into the sky-blue eyes and lit them up, putting out the overjoyed tears that for a moment had begun to glisten in the shade of black eyelashes. 

“How did you know…?”, he whispered as if he was talking to himself rather than to Brandon. Then he decided that after all, he was curious about Brandon’s answer to that question, so he turned to his companion and tried again, this time more audaciously. “How did you know it would suit me? It… it’s nothing like my two pairs of jeans and three shirts per month quota, right? I had no idea I could even wear stylish stuff like that, I thought I’d be looking like a dressed-up jerk.” He laughed as grains of disbelief still resounded in his voice.

“Not at all”, insisted Brandon. “You’re really handsome, you just don’t always remember how to show it, that’s all. You really are a gorgeous man.” Jamie’s pulse sped up rabidly, even though for a moment he couldn’t believe his ears, or maybe was afraid to believe them. And hardly had he processed what he’d just heard, Brandon carried on with a playful smile on his lips. “I think you should keep this shirt, will you? So you can always remember how beautiful you are.”

For a moment Jamie grew silent and bit his lips, breathing a little faster.

Had Brandon really just said that? Had he said the words that Jamie had already stopped to dare to believe he would ever hear?

Was this really the way that Brandon saw him? Did he really see inside him a man that also Jamie himself could like and be proud of? 

“Do you mean it?” This probably wasn’t the best way to respond to a touching compliment, but it took Jamie a lot of courage to open up before Brandon what was going on inside his mind, showing his vulnerability with no ornaments to cover it up. To be ridiculed was one of Jamie’s greatest fears, but on a moment like this he wasn’t afraid to show this to Brandon anymore. 

Then he gazed straight into Brandon’s eyes. Where there had usually been indifference, or emptiness and confusion in those orbs of jade, now there was only assurance and poise. Brandon didn’t have to answer the question anymore. Now Jamie knew that he meant what he had said. 

But even so, what was that about? What did Brandon want to tell him? “Do you really want me to remember… something like this?”

_You don’t just go around randomly telling to random people that they are beautiful and they should never forget that. Or do you?_

But Brandon was completely unaffected by the turmoil inside Jamie. He seemed not to realize what was so special about whatever he had said, and why Jamie was making such a fuss about that. His disregard for what sounded like breakthrough lines to Jamie was intriguing and somewhat scary at the same time. 

“Yes I do”, he replied casually. “You really should remember that”, he added, making Jamie’s head spin – even though by now Jamie was sure that what Brandon really meant wasn’t quite what it sounded like… or rather, that it was exactly what it sounded like. No innuendos, plain face value.

But still, even just this “face value” for Jamie was more than enough. He took a deep breath, like he wanted to convince himself that all this, and both of them together, side by side in a single mirror, was real. 

Normally, by sheer good manners Jamie would be at least inclined to refuse the gift or to question it. True, Brandon must have had quite a decently paying job beforehand if he could afford a collection of friggin Gucci shirts this huge and diverse, but even so, it was not like Jamie could feel comfortable being offered a materialized equivalent of a *00$ paycheck. He was simply not used to receiving gifts of that price range, much less just like that, at a moment’s notice. And why should anyone give him such a top brand shirt in first place? 

Now, however, things were entirely different, because Brandon made it very clear why it was that he wanted Jamie to have that shirt – and even if his verbal statement hadn’t been enough, it was supported by the look that Jamie could verify in the mirror. To show any reluctance to accept this gift would be to ignore the difference that Brandon was trying to make, to depreciate his warmest intentions. It would smash to pieces the magic of this connection they shared right now.

And, admittedly, Jamie really did want to be spoiled by Brandon with a present like that.

So, instead of playing a coy I-couldn’t-accept-such-luxury-so-let’s-bargain game, Jamie said exactly what he meant. “You know, it’s… that’s so generous of you…” He let out a quiet, bashful chuckle that covered for his loss of words. “I’m not sure if I can show it to you right, but I really am moved. Brandon, I…” There was so much he wanted to tell him, and maybe a even little more than that. And he was afraid that even if he had been given the time until the end of the world, he still wouldn’t manage to explain to Brandon every nook and cranny of how he had made him feel. Not to mention that no words could really grasp the essence of Jamie’s emotions. It seemed like words could only degrade them, instead of expressing their purity and sincerity. “I…”, he tried again, but broke off immediately, and instead he held Brandon close, burying his face in Brandon’s shoulder. A touch was much better a way to prove their bond than anything that Jamie was able to utter at the moment. And besides, he felt once again rather close to tears, and he supposed he wasn’t brave enough to cry in front of Brandon just yet, no matter the cause. 

And this time not even this display of affection nor such intrusion upon Brandon’s private physical sphere made Brandon lose his composure. Quite the opposite, he even gave Jamie a gentle hug, wrapping his arms around him. “It’s okay”, he soothed Jamie, reversing their usual roles in what felt to Jamie truly comforting and empowering. “I’m glad.”

Jamie clung to him a little tighter, allowing himself to enjoy Brandon’s closeness and warmth in a way he may never have experienced before. 

“I’m glad, too”, he stated as he looked up to treat himself to seeing Brandon’s face again. Now it had just occurred to him that he did know what to tell Brandon, after all. “It’s such an amazing gift, you know? To make someone believe they are beautiful, it must be the most beautiful thing you can give to another person. And you are wonderful too, do you realize that?” To finish the confession, Jamie planted a gentle kiss upon Brandon’s cheek. 

Perhaps expectedly, only now did Brandon seem a little startled, maybe because the words that Jamie used were too big, or maybe because Jamie himself was getting a little too clingy. Or both. The surprising part was that somehow Jamie didn’t seem to mind anymore.

This was just the way Brandon was, after all, wasn’t it?

So instead of putting himself down for not being able to sustain the mood, much less to make it even better by saying the perfect words at a perfect time, Jamie could only laugh from the bottom of his heart upon seeing Brandon’s confused face.

Brandon was right, after all. It was okay. Everything was okay, right then and there, when they could be intimately careless even if just for a few moments.

Turning back to the wardrobe, Jamie scanned the rows of shirts with excited eyes. He couldn’t remain the only dressed-up dude in the room, after all. And for being such a good boy today, he deserved to fulfill one of his fresh (not so) secret fantasies and have Brandon wear one of those sexy, classy, Gucci extravagances.

The variety of colors and patterns made Jamie sway once more, but this much of emotions and stimuli he was sure to handle.

Perhaps he wasn’t such a wimp, after all.


	13. Yesterday my life was filled with rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On Brandon's first night as an official inhabitant of Jamie's apartment, Brandon and Jamie decide to make an experiment, and both parties agree that it will not involve any "smuggling and fondling". Cautious as they both are about what they are attempting to do, they will find themselves losing their guard in a way neither of them has expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I'm quite shocked myself at the pace of my recent chapter production. Let's not get too excited, I don't expect the next update to happen so soon.  
> Which is why it's best to inform with a month advance that March 16 will be Jamie's birthday. (He's turning thirty-four, if you really want to know. In the story he has just turned 30.) If you want to send him your wishes, show him some love, or if you simply have something to tell either him or Brandon, don't be shy, leave a comment. :) Jamie will be overjoyed to hear from you. (As for Brandon, of course nobody can vouch for him, but you have to be warned that Brandon is much more possessive about Jamie than he looks... or likes to admit.)

It was a total surprise how things turned out. Just when Jamie had got used to not expecting much good to happen, just as he had started to feel an odd familiarity towards his constant feelings of weakness and helplessness, they did make something good, something tangible and real out of what had seemed like an impending disaster. If somebody had told Jamie before that an extravagant Gucci shirt had the ability to make such a difference, Jamie would have cruelly laughed at the uncanny prophet. Especially after that bloody bathroom incident, bloody in all respects, when things had spun out of control and there was not telling if the control could ever be reclaimed. 

Frankly, there still was no telling about that. And unexpectedly, now it wasn’t even the point. The miraculous change was about that at least for now, for a few hours, or maybe for a day or two, they didn’t need to worry about any of this. Not about control, not about the next steps, not about the future, not about the past. 

And the magic of their connection this time turned out to be one not to be dispelled so easily. It lasted for minutes, then hours, and then they carried it all the way back to Jamie’s apartment. 

Before Brandon finished his packing, he too changed into a shirt that Jamie had picked for him, a sublime sapphire blue shirt with a contrasting lighter shade of blue overlaid at the collar. Wearing it Brandon looked simply sensational, sharp and hypnotic, and positively seductive. The moment Jamie saw him in that altered outfit, with a matching pair of jeans to complete the image, he knew that he was looking at the shades of how Brandon used to be, perhaps the real Brandon, the one from before he had become a human wreck for whatever horrifying, not quite disclosed reasons. Jamie could almost smell the cloud of astringent perfume that definitely would normally surround an everyday Brandon, a scent irresistibly sexy in its refined bitterness, and hear the squeals of swooning women breaking their necks to take a better look at Brandon every time he passed by. 

And the truth was that Jamie, too, found it difficult not to get too lustful just by observing Brandon looking like that and standing so close – and here he thought that he had got used to restraining his attraction through all those weeks he had spent living his sexless life with Brandon under the same roof. Fortunately, Jamie was also still too high from the moments they shared in front of Brandon’s wardrobe mirror to care about such down-to-earth matters as his unfulfilled sex drives. He felt like Brandon appreciated him back, and cared about him in return, and at the moment that was everything that counted.

Following Jamie’s suggestion to ‘go out someplace nice and have some fun like two healthy males in their thirties should’ (no ambiguity intended), they stopped by a cozy coffee shop which Jamie liked to visit every now and then with a colleague or two on their way back from work. Chuckling to himself each time he noticed the dropping jaws and popping eyes in a typical women’s (and quite a few men’s, too) reaction to Brandon – who himself appeared completely unaware of the fuss he was the cause of and remained super cool all the time – Jamie enjoyed the long moments of relaxed chattering over an exquisite latte. He was so glad to be able to share that time with Brandon, even though at the back of his mind something would question time and again how the hell they could both be so laid back after what Jamie had seen in Brandon’s bathroom. 

They made it an unspoken point to talk about safe, non-upsetting topics. Or rather it was Jamie delivering passionate monologues about music (and namely about whatever inspired him from what he had seen among Brandon’s vinyl collection), books, pets and all other things dear to Jamie, usually interrupted with Brandon’s dry remarks right on time before Jamie could begin to wonder if he wasn’t being a wordy bore. But still Brandon was, well, being Brandon, and no exciting topic – a topic assumed to be exciting for him, that is, because with such impressive collections of clothes or records it would be difficult to conceive that Brandon should not like fashion or music, or not be interested in either – could make him shed more than several words at a time, a large percentage of which were direct answers to Jamie’s questions. 

Over the course of their conversation, Jamie gradually realized that Brandon’s reserve was not a result of his disconnection or a lack of interest in the topic (or in the person that was trying to talk to him). Brandon seemed like a classic case of verbal impoverishment (alexithymia, was that the proper medical term?). It wasn’t like he wasn’t passionate about the things that he enjoyed, now Jamie was more or less sure about that; it was that he couldn’t find himself a way to reach this passion underneath his skin and share it so that another human being could understand it. It was more than just being unable to find the right words to say – it was as if Brandon couldn’t trace back and understand the feelings themselves, those special feelings that he would obviously experience when he saw a nice shirt or heard a good tune. There was a certain endearing quality to how Brandon expressed the whole range of positive emotions with phrases like ‘it was okay’, ‘nice’, ‘cool’, ‘I liked that’ or ‘that was something’ (Jamie identified the last one as an indication of superlative in Brandonese). But at the same time, it gave Jamie an itching, irritating feeling. He wanted to get to know Brandon. He wanted to understand him, to see the world through his eyes. He really did. But now he knew he couldn’t. Not by just talking to him, and not by just hearing what he would say.

He could only achieve all that by listening to him. And listening required patience. And time. And Jamie could only hope there would be enough time for the two of them until he reached that goal. 

Anyway, they were in wonderful moods when they returned to Jamie’s apartment. Brandon looked comfortable and almost playful when he was arranging his clothes inside the space of the bedroom wardrobe and a cabinet that Jamie had allotted to him. Jamie was observing that for a couple of moments with growing hesitation. Then he decided to gather up his courage and take the chance to mark this unusual evening as the beginning of something extraordinary and permanent.

He was afraid. Of course he was. How many times before had everything seemed to work smooth and fine until Jamie decided he wanted more, as a result ending up pushing Brandon too far? Jamie certainly was a lousy gambler, never knowing the right moment to place his bets and risk the stakes.

But then – who knew, maybe there would be no second chances? This magic spell had already lasted much longer than Jamie was initially willing to give it credit for. What grounds did he have to believe it would not fade away the morning after? What could warrant that when they woke up Brandon would still remember how close and comfortable with each other they were that day, and affirmation and trust would not be replaced with distance and stiffness? 

If Jamie wanted to make something real out of that special day, something that would last for a more indefinite time, he had to make that bet. And then have his fingers crossed so that Brandon would not misunderstand Jamie’s proposal, even in case Brandon’s answer eventually had to be ‘no’. 

And so Jamie stepped forward. Second by second he could feel the air slowly fill his lungs, and he tried to focus on the sensation before the sudden throbbing of his heart could shake out his brain. 

“Um… Brandon, look… It’s not such a big deal as it may sound, so please don’t take it the wrong way…” He laughed nervously and brushed his hair off of the forehead, as his traditionally captivating preface lines had earned him a remotely curious gaze from Brandon. Well, soldier, now it was the time to brace yourself and carry on with this self-induced shit. “I was just wondering, since now you’ll be living here anyway… Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if you slept with me in the bedroom? I mean sleeping as in really just sleeping, as in physiologically, as in hibernation, not as in sexual-activity-implying sleeping… alright?” Okay, that was definitely going amazing. The awkward part seemed to have turned a tad bit more awkward than it could… or should have. “Of course I’ll understand if you don’t feel comfortable with the idea. As I said, it’s really no big deal, I just wanted you to feel at home here, so you know, it’s whatever you prefer. I feel like we could at least give it a try, as an experiment, and see how it works.” Now Jamie was so flustered that he couldn’t even tell if his rescue attempts had made the situation better or worse.

With his typical indifferent patience, Brandon waited until the soliloquy was over with Jamie running out of stammered words to say; then he responded with a calm “An experiment sounds good enough”. 

The sizzling shiver that Jamie experienced inside his chest at Brandon’s words almost caused him to jump uncontrollably all over the place, which would arguably be the shortest way to freak Brandon out and make him regret agreeing to conduct any experiments together. Perfectly aware of these predictable results of his outburst of joy, Jamie managed to control himself, and with a rather quality imitation of poise he admitted: “Yes, it will be only… fair for this to be an experiment.” Then he added just for the record: “If there is anything about that that you’d like me to know or consider, please tell me straight away. I really don’t want you to feel uncomfortable in the place you can call home from now on, so do remember that.” A mischievous smile emerged on his lips when he recalled an important thing to mention. “On my part, I can promise you there will be no snuggling and fondling, unless you explicitly specify you have nothing against that.”

Brandon didn’t seem to share Jamie’s amusement. “Snuggling would be too much right now”, he replied seriously. “Sharing a bed with someone is going to be difficult enough anyway.”

Jamie could hardly restrain a wince. Contradicting signals from Brandon never failed to have him confused. Brandon made it sound like he was worried about getting horny when in bed with Jamie, but as they had made it clear through the past few weeks, it was Jamie who was hot for Brandon and not the other way round. And it was also Jamie who had not-so-jokingly suggested ‘snuggling and fondling’, which Brandon declined. It wasn’t easy to decide, then, why Brandon was being so peculiar about Jamie staying away from him specifically when they were in bed together – he had no apparent problems holding Jamie or even clinging to him at any other time. What was it about the bedtime that made Brandon so upset about any traces of intimacy? So far this question didn’t seem like something that Jamie could find the answers to telepathically or by picking up random clues. 

What he did know for certain, however, was how sturdily Brandon insisted that he wanted to sleep alone that night they had met and had sex at Jamie’s place. Apparently it wasn’t anything related personally to Jamie, unless there was something about Jamie that had been driving Brandon away since the day they met – but the story they had shared so far proved differently. It seemed like some more general issues were at stake here. 

Anyway, Jamie replied with a reassuring “Of course, I understand that”, even though he didn’t quite understand a thing here apart from the very obvious fact that Brandon was facing some intimacy issues that escaped all the logic a human being could conceive of. “I only want you to feel alright here… and to know that we’re in this together, right? Without making any fuss and attaching any strings.”

It was a good idea to mention not attaching any strings. Brandon didn’t react to that declaration verbally, but he was visibly relieved to hear Jamie indirectly swear that he wouldn’t be ‘imagining things’ just because they decided to sleep in one bed – as an experiment, naturally. 

And so the experiment commenced. Jamie dug a spare pillow and a blanket out of his linen chest, then he arranged them in an aesthetically most appealing way possible, and that was about it. He wouldn’t ever admit to Brandon that before going to bed he had drunk a double dose of sedative herbal tea to cool himself down, or else he probably wouldn’t have been able to fall asleep that night. Well, going to bed with Brandon, even if only literally, was quite an experience, something exhilarating and unnerving at the same time, and Jamie was pretty sure that if left to his own devices, he wouldn’t be able to contain himself. Just laying by Brandon’s side in all that darkness, sensing his scent from such a close range and imagining his silhouette under the blanket would be perfectly enough to make Jamie’s body spring and rock on its own, under the circumstances an outcome no less than embarrassing, to put it mildly.

It was quite an event not just because – after Brandon had put it in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t interested in a sexual relationship with Jamie – there seemed to be no hope of Brandon ever moving to that bedroom, much less at such a short notice. It was also the first time Jamie would sleep in one bed with someone since Jessie had left him. And come to think of it, also the first time ever that he would sleep in one bed with a guy he liked who wasn’t Jessie.

Jamie’s tea definitely must have been some high-class stuff, best in its league – and besides, after a day with so many swirling emotions and shocking turns, Jamie was in fact exhausted to an extent he himself couldn’t even have predicted. He felt massively drowsy as soon as he placed his head on the pillow, hardly had they exchanged their goodnights, never minding if it was Brandon beside him or anyone else, or even if there was anyone there at all. 

Behind Jamie’s closed eyes, somewhere on the borderline between subconscious and unconscious, images of Gucci shirts with Brandon’s beautiful body peeking from underneath swapped bouncingly with blood-dripping walls and deafening shrieks. Luckily, Jamie blacked out before he had the chance to dwell on that.

Upon waking up, Jamie still felt much light-headed with all the fatigue and contradicting sentiments from the day before. The moment he was coming to, he had a total blank in his head – and so he was completely unprepared for what was in store. 

Along with someone’s presence very close to him, he felt something – a hand, a certain large, manly, well-groomed hand with ridiculously long and slender fingers – touching the back of his head.

In an instant he remembered everything, and it made him wonder how on earth he survived the sudden downpour of the thrill. 

He turned his head so that he would face Brandon, and then he opened one eye, shyly, but curiously. Then, encouraged, he proceeded with the other eye too. Within this proximity, Brandon’s face looked even more enthralling than ever before. It appeared serene, almost angelic; the mellow sensation to Jamie’s eyes was so out of this world that he couldn’t be that sure if it wasn’t still a dream.

Then again, what was going on right now was absolutely explainable in terms different from the realm of dreams or plain fiction. It may as well have been just that sleeping here, side by side with Jamie, letting down his guard, trusting somebody enough to share this private space of these private moments – Brandon had discovered that he indeed had a place where he belonged. It made utter and absolute sense.

A little coyly but steadily, Jamie reached out his hand from under the blanket and joined it with Brandon’s hand to shove it more daringly into his own sleep-ruffled locks. Brandon did not hesitate, not even for a second. He dove with his hand into the chocolate brown thickness – and he did it with such tenderness that it was truly difficult to believe if this was the same guy as the one who had asserted himself against any ‘snuggling and fondling’ just an evening before.

“Good morning”, he murmured close to Jamie’s ear with a tone that made Jamie’s heart pound like thunder. You don’t say your ‘good morning’ like that unless it’s a really serious, really intense morning after, Jamie thought, and in fact the picture they were a part of right now made him feel like hot, passionate sex that in reality they had had no pint of the night before. 

That was precisely it, incomprehensible as it sounded: they acted and they felt like they had just spent hours on delightful lovemaking, only their bodies never even as much as brushed each other. 

And even though Jamie had had his concerns about the moments like this, if he wouldn’t experience any unwelcomed arousal in response to Brandon’s closeness, now it turned out to feel nothing like that. The warmth that hissed in his chest and circulated in his belly was exquisite and pleasant, and as far as Jamie could tell, it had nothing to do with the groin area.

On a moment of revelation, Jamie realized there wasn’t anything strange to how it felt – because it was really like they had had sex, not with their bodies, but with their souls. Who said that sex had to be only about the physical? Alright, for some people it definitely was, Brandon included among them; but true sex was a complex process, and if some people could have it without the emotional part, why couldn’t they have it without the physical part? It was exactly the same thing as Jamie had told Brandon the night they met: sex was about trust, about discovering things together, about letting someone in, unafraid, about admiring another person and letting them admire you. And now they had it all. They really had it all!

It didn’t even feel like any sort of consolation prize. On the contrary, it had a spiritual taste to it, and Jamie was sure he had never experienced such rapture before.

He slightly lifted his body on an elbow to lean towards Brandon. When he looked straight into that handsome face, he noticed how much Brandon’s eyes had changed over one night only; instead of aloof and unapproachable they were now clear and peaceful. Jamie couldn’t explain how enticing that was, even if he tried to. The newly found warmth made Brandon even more desirable than before. 

Smiling from his lips all the way to his own eyes, Jamie stroked with his fingers the wrist of the hand that was caressing his hair, subsequently nuzzling against the palm… which may have been a slight liberty taken from the ban on ‘snuggling and fondling’, but not that Brandon seemed to mind that too much.

“Good morning, beautiful”, Jamie responded then cheerfully, his voice soaking with infatuation. Brandon made a lovely embarrassed flinch and reverted his gaze, possibly having absolutely no idea just how he was making Jamie want to kiss him right then and there. Which of course was out of question: Brandon had given Jamie his trust, very likely the most precious, the most expensive thing in the world – the right to rest on a pillow beside him all night long, the right to feel his fingers run through one’s hair and to hear his hello first thing in the morning. Jamie would have to be a perverted lunatic, which he chose to believe he was not, to betray that trust and rob himself of all this, and the many more things that were yet to come.

So instead, he waited patiently with a gentle smile, until seconds later Brandon returned with his unclouded emerald look straight into Jamie’s eyes, smiling back at him. An innocent smile of a boy who felt safe at home. A kind, disarming, guileless smile, the best there could ever be. 

A smile of the one who had just seen himself in the eyes of another, and liked what he had seen much more than what he used to see in the mirror. 

Now Jamie was at a loss for words, and even at a loss for thoughts. Tracing Brandon’s smile with his fingertips, he couldn’t think about anything else but wishing fervently, with all his might, that the smile was here to stay. With every inch of his trembling body and touched soul, Jamie promised he would do all that it took not to let this smile fade away. 

It was exactly then that Jamie found it in his heart to admit that he was in love.

And this discovery was neither scary nor depressing, nothing of the sort that Jamie had been anxiously expecting.

He would rather say that nothing else had ever felt more natural, more welcome, more right than him in love with Brandon. 

Well, what do you know?


	14. Feels so good, the rain and thinking of you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompted by Jamie, Brandon finds it in himself to talk about Sissy. As a reward for his bravery, Brandon receives some love - not too much, however, but exactly the amount he can handle.

Jamie was perfectly aware that precious moments, the genuine jewel-like sort of moments may have lasted for a minute, but they stayed with you forever. The shorter the moment, the greater – more fierce, more fiery, more intense – its impact. And the first morning that Jamie shared with Brandon in one bed was one of such moments of immeasurable value, fleeting and yet almost tangible, and endlessly dear; a moment that had you wishing time would do you a favor and cease to exist at least for a little while. 

Even as he stepped out of the bed, Jamie still had that moment engraved deep inside his body, inside his heart, and inside all of his senses. And he knew he would be carrying it along with himself from now on. 

There was something immensely amusing about it, about how Jamie’s internal control of his feelings for Brandon, which he had so far managed to keep lidded for quite some time, now suddenly gushed and flooded all of his mind, every single thought, every single feeling. At work, for the first time since Brandon had come to stay with him for what turned out an indefinite period, Jamie would find it hard to stay focused. He simply wasn’t present. His thoughts drifted away all on their own; his eyes would unconsciously stray every few minutes to the wristwatch, counting the seconds until he could call it a day and see Brandon again. 

He just missed him so much. He wanted to see him so badly, to remember his gaze, his smile, his lanky silhouette, to rediscover the way he sounded, the way he smelt, the way he felt. How could so much have changed with just a tiny wisp of indication that Brandon, after all, might feel the same way?

Not that Jamie cared all that much about the answer. And not that the said wisp was really all that tiny, at least not to Jamie. 

But at the same time, in the back of his mind, Jamie also knew that reality would come knocking at the two of them, sooner or later. And if that was the way things had to be, he preferred to have a say in when and how it would get to them, however difficult and fantasy-breaking it would necessarily turn out to be.

He had to ask Brandon about that bathroom. He knew he had no choice – he had to do that first, or the bathroom would come back to them and cast its gloomy shadow over them by itself. 

And if that was the case, then there was no point wasting any more time. Jamie decided to ask the question straight away and get over it.

He did it after he had some dinner when he had come back from work. Brandon was accompanying him over a coffee – as usual, he refused to eat, claiming that he had already had a bite (and maybe in fact he really had, like, literally a bite of an apple or a tablespoon of fat-free yoghurt about five hours before). As much as Jamie was worried about Brandon’s eating habits, he had learnt better than to keep insisting.

“You see, I realize you may not like it, but I really need to ask you that”, Jamie began cautiously, as if he wanted to give Brandon a heads-up and let him run beforehand in case Brandon didn’t feel like receiving difficult questions. Which meant more or less ‘always’. “…Who was that in your bathroom?”

Brandon gave Jamie an expected wince, but he wasn’t that reluctant to answer, at least not for Brandon’s standards. It was as if Brandon had been expecting that Jamie would ask him that sooner or later, and had accepted that inevitability. 

Following a short pause, which seemed like Brandon was trying to find the most accurate words in which to convey the simple fact, Jamie heard him answer: “That was my sister”.

Instinctively, Jamie gasped, feeling his blood drain down from his face in horror. Not that he expected that it would have been a random person that had slit their wrists for some equally random reasons exactly there in Brandon’s bathroom, but still, being confronted with the naked truth like that, after all these weeks of a continuous unknown, felt immensely powerful. And the past tense that Brandon had used… of course it might have been simply a match with how Jamie had formulated his question, the ‘who _was_ that’ part to be precise, but it might as well have been more meaningful than that. This thought sent earnest shivers down Jamie’s spine. 

“That was? … You mean…” Struggling for the best way to ask if his sister was dead now, Jamie eventually gave up and instead he squeezed Brandon’s hand, with his own grip, trembling and warm, letting Brandon know about his compassion and the anxiety they both shared. He also somehow managed to mumble “I… I’m so sorry”, and was surprised to find how surprised Brandon’s look resting upon their joined hands was.

“No, it’s not like that”, he reassured Jamie, vaguely replying to his fears untold out loud. “Sissy is alright now.” He uttered his sister’s name matter-of-factly, as if he had already said it a million times before, or as if it was nothing worth any more attention than that. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

As his first reaction, Jamie almost choked on his relief. So Brandon’s sister wasn’t dead. Her alleged suicide attempt was unsuccessful. Nothing irreversible had happened. Nothing that would prevent Jamie from helping Brandon get back on his own two feet.

That sense of relief, however, could not last for long. Within one quick flash of thoughts which accompanied the rough sensation of Brandon’s skin under Jamie’s soothingly stroking thumb, Jamie realized what it must have meant for Brandon – for a person like Brandon, with Brandon’s attitudes and ideas about himself, under Brandon’s circumstances – to have a close relative attempt a suicide under his own roof. 

To begin with, it was impossible to remain unaffected if a person close to you had tried to take their own life – not if you were an actual human being capable of thinking and feeling. There was no way you wouldn’t be asking yourself questions you felt would be better left unanswered. Was there really nothing you could have done? Could you not have prevented all of this, could you not have eased the pain? Was there really nothing you were capable of, other than watching your loved one writhe and suffer? Or perhaps even worse, maybe you were one of the reasons of that suffering. Maybe it was something you had said or done, or your controlling, or your indifference. There were a million ways in which you could have found yourself guilty of the atrocious crime of making a dearest one believe their life was not worth living. You only had to know where to look for those ways.

And Brandon was certainly an expert finder of his own faults and misgivings. 

Brandon, who kept insisting Jamie would be better off if he never found out who Brandon really was. 

Brandon, who was so certain Jamie would never accept him the way he truly was. 

Brandon, to whom it never occurred that somebody might be compassionate about his problems and wish to help him out rather than condemning him as a pervert and a freak.

Brandon, who was willing to pay just about any price to make his secrets stay what they were – secrets, exactly. 

Brandon, the one judging and loathing himself like nobody else in the world could possibly judge and loathe him. 

Brandon, who believed so fanatically that he did not deserve to be understood, sympathized with, and ultimately, loved.

And that Brandon, that very same Brandon had his sister try to kill herself in his bathroom. There was no way Brandon would not blame himself for that – like he had been the ultimate reason she tried to do that to herself, or like he was the one directly trying to kill her. He must have still felt her blood on his hands, both physically (assuming, which was almost certain, that he was the one who had found her dying in his bathroom) and metaphorically. It was no wonder that he decided he couldn’t stay in that apartment anymore. It was no wonder that when Jamie found him a few days later, he was so broken and all messed up. 

It was a terrifying revelation, but on the other hand, Jamie was relieved to finally have almost all of the puzzles fit. He had known all along there was some hideous monster that they were dealing with, but right now it seemed a little less overwhelming and scary – now that Jamie finally knew the monster’s face and name: guilt. 

“Is there anything I could you for you… for both of you?”, he asked, his hand still embracing Brandon’s hand, tones of solace still ringing in his voice.

“No, there’s nothing.” Brandon’s blunt reply bathed Jamie in a cold shower. It wasn’t the nicest thing to experience, but well, you had to get used to it and learn to shake the ice off your back if you wanted to cope with Brandon on a daily basis. 

After all, cold water was good for your health, thought Jamie as he slowly let go of Brandon’s hand. He nodded, as if admitting he could do nothing but accept Brandon’s icy response.

“Well… thanks for telling me the truth”, he addressed Brandon with a quiet smile. Brandon’s confession was something really important, maybe even groundbreaking. It would have been totally out of place not to let him know how Jamie appreciated Brandon’s courage and integrity that allowed him to share that dark, depressing secret.

Brandon nodded back.

“That’s okay, I mean, you have the right to know.” And very unexpectedly, he decided to elaborate. “I should have told you before.”

Jamie inhaled attentively. He suddenly felt very sentimental about this huge, for Brandon, display of concern for another human being in spite of his own inner tumult.

“But it’s such a painful topic, right? It must be so damn difficult to entrust someone you don’t even know too well with such an experience. And now that I know, it’s that much easier for me”, he explained, the corners of his lips slightly curved upwards.

Brandon appeared genuinely surprised at Jamie’s words. He blinked a few times over a second or two, like he was having a hard time calculating how learning about someone’s suicide attempt could make it easier for anyone.

“It is? … If it is, then… that’s good.” He returned a shy, almost invisible smile, but Jamie’s eyes were extra sensitive to his smiles, and they had never missed not even a single one. It was no different this time. And Brandon’s smile, even this microscopic, even this inconspicuous, was always perfectly enough. There went the butterflies in Jamie’s stomach, the sizzling in his chest. A state of bliss not quite like any other. 

And so Brandon’s smile was immediately reflected on Jamie’s face, broad and gleeful, like Jamie’s face was some kind of magnifying glass.

“It is”, he emphasized, the whiteness of his teeth flashing in a growing jubilation. “Brandon, you… you’re not alone, not anymore, do you understand that?” 

This very simple truth carried a sense of discovery and adventure, and Jamie felt himself deeply touched by the sensation. He could feel it echo in his blood and clank against his bones. It was overwhelming and empowering all at the same time, making him want to laugh, scream, and cry for joy.

No, Brandon was not alone anymore. He had let Jamie in.

They made it.

Insecurely, as if not sure if he really was so convinced about all this, Brandon nodded his head. His lovely, endearing smile had stayed with him, as if he had forgotten to wipe it off. 

Normally, Jamie would have thrown himself at Brandon: give him a hug, clasp his hand or otherwise cling to him. He was an emotional man who liked to translate his affection into physicality, and obviously in that respect Brandon was his complete opposite. Jamie knew very well that if he wanted to feel Brandon, he had to take the initiative and be gentle enough not to make Brandon feel assaulted or trapped – and hope that Brandon would not reject him.

But this time, it was different. This time, as if wishing to test if the words that had just moved him so much in fact held any truth, Jamie stayed where he was. And with an incessant, tender smile on his face, he invitingly held out his hand towards Brandon.

 _Let him decide if he wants you close_ , he remembered his own thoughts from their first night together. _Don’t assault him, just give him the choice._

And Brandon did make his choice, actually much quicker than Jamie had even counted for. Without much hesitation, he reached out and grasped Jamie’s hand with his. 

This beautiful hand turned out to make such a perfect match with Jamie’s that for a while it made Jamie speechless with amazement.

He laughed as he squeezed Brandon’s hand with all the warmth and faith that he had in himself, all that he could offer to another human being. “It will be okay, Brandon”, he reassured the other man, positive and quite amused at how much meaning such a cliché line could possibly contain.

Tentatively, he moved himself closer to Brandon. Brandon showed no signs of escape or rejection, and instead he kept on seducing Jamie with that exquisite simile of his. That symmetrical, flawless, tempting smile, a little coy, a little provocative, radiating with childlike innocence. Every time Jamie saw it, it was like a nudge straight into the heart. Right now, too, Jamie could tell it made him blush like crazy; feeling like a schoolboy, he had a hard time looking straight into Brandon’s eyes.

Overcoming his own daze at the way Brandon looked, and the usual anxiety if that single question, that single move would not be too much – if it would not be that one thing carried too far, far enough to spoil a seemingly ideal moment – Jamie finally brought himself to ask: “Can I hug you?”.

Brandon replied with a timid nod, again with no detectable symptoms of doubt. Over a very short time, yet again Jamie felt relieved; only this time, the relief was like a waterfall, coming down on him with a powerful current of intimacy and elation. 

“I’m so happy that you’re here with me, Brandon”, he exclaimed as he wrapped his arms around Brandon’s shoulders. “You have no idea… you have no idea”, he repeated, in fact contradicting himself, as he was telling this exactly to help Brandon get any idea of what it all meant to Jamie.

Not that he minded. Not that it mattered. Brandon burying his face in Jamie’s hair – was it only Jamie’s wishful thinking, or did he really fancy those chocolate brown waves? – and nuzzling against Jamie’s temple. The trembling that traversed Jamie’s spine every time he felt Brandon’s touch and breath against his hair. The soft, dry sensation of Brandon’s cheek as Jamie rubbed against it with his nose. That was all that mattered. There was no space for anything else there. 

What they did right then and there, what they shared might have seemed trivial, insignificant to the rest of the world. But for Jamie, in those seconds, the world was exactly this. Them. Nothing on the side. Nothing in between. 

And even though Brandon perhaps was not even capable of conceiving a thought such as this in his own mind, Jamie was certain that right now he, too, felt exactly the same way.


	15. No more crying in the rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sudden call from his ex-boyfriend upsets Jamie and drowns him in his own paranoia. Efforts on the part of a benevolent Brandon to talk some sense into Jamie do not exactly improve the situation. For the first time in a long while, Jamie has to face his own fears and weaknesses, and he learns the hard way how it can be much more of a challenge than devoting all your time and resources to help out somebody else.

This whole city did not seem big enough to provide Jamie enough space to run. And neither did it seem dark enough to grant him with enough corners to hide.

He had to face it: he was trapped, escape was not an option.

It felt like all he had left to do was to break down and burst in tears right in the middle of that bloody pavement. And he admitted he was close to yielding to that necessity, which was with each step turning into more of a desire. It suddenly had ceased to matter if anyone would see him, or what anyone would think. He had had it, he could take no more.

He realized that it was since long that he had been feeling as hopeless and desperate as today. True, he had been feeling hopeless and desperate on more than one occasion over the last few weeks, but that was for Brandon, and not for himself. In some funny way, hopelessness felt for somebody else always turned out more hopeful than that felt for your own. It must have been for that reason that Jamie wound up so concerned about others – people and animals alike – and even seemed to enjoy that concern. It hurt less to care about others' problems, and at the same time it made you feel better about yourself if you succeeded in doing it right, like you were making a difference.

But this time, Jamie's own problems had finally caught him and cornered him, like demons he had failed to expel.

The humiliating part – or maybe rather, one humiliating part – was that nothing that special had really happened. It was but a sequence of trivial occurrences which reminded Jamie blatantly that his past was not yet over and done, while his future was going nowhere.

He got out of his own house – ran away, to put it more accurately – for the privilege to be alone. Not to be surrounded, not to be cornered, not to be judged. He just wanted to be left alone and take the impact of the drama, experience the turmoil to his heart's content. The problem was that he couldn’t. There were goddamn people everywhere. In the back alleys, in the park, the passer-bys, the witnesses. Never ready to help, never willing to understand, always glad to condemn, as if they were something better. There was nowhere to hide. Jamie was always lonely, but he was never alone.

Sensing the breakdown crouch upon him, Jamie decided to stop right there and then. He was too tired to carry on fighting the storm inside him. The invisible weight on his shoulders felt too heavy, too. He just couldn’t hold it in anymore; he had this physical urge to let go, like a long-distance runner facing an unshakable fatigue right in the middle of the race.

He had reached the point when he couldn’t care less if anyone could see him. He simply sat on the bench at the nearest bus stop, buried his face in his hands, and burst out in quiet, relentless sobs. 

Come to think of it, nothing could have been more obvious than that. And yet, Jamie had never seen that coming. He had become so engrossed with Brandon’s life and problems that he had actually tricked himself into believing that his own unresolved problems would disappear all on their own just by not concerning himself with them anymore. Clearly, he couldn’t have been more wrong. One tiny hint of the problems coming back and Jamie ended up broken in two, like a thin twig broken upon a slightest blow of the wind. 

He couldn’t even figure out what it was that made him hurt so much: was it that the thought of Jessie, his ex, living a happy and fulfilled life with his current boyfriend still brought Jamie so much embarrassing pain – or was it Brandon’s indifference that made Jamie remember so sharply just how alone he was? 

The chagrin made it impossible for Jamie to think straight. In the back of his mind he knew exactly that right now he was thinking with his emotions and not his reason, and the emotions would only push and inflate each other, only making the pain worse rather than letting it calm and gradually die down. And yet, he couldn’t stop himself. There was the rage underneath his torment, the rage that made him feel entitled – the rage that seemed to give him the right to accuse all those people that in his mind were guilty of either causing him to or letting him suffer like that. 

It was almost like he was not allowed to stop suffering, because that would mean he would not be angry anymore – and yet he needed that anger not to feel any more unimportant and powerless than that. 

Of course, he was also already feeling ashamed at the tempest that was raging on inside him, the storm that would be dismissed by anyone else as nothing but a childish drama. After all, what had happened that evening was such a trifling matter that he would have to be considered a menopausal woman going through an especially challenging belated PMS phase for people to believe he had the right to take the thing so seriously.

After all, it was nothing more than Jessie calling to invite him over Javier’s birthday party. 

Like being stuck as a foreign body in that lovey-dovey picture frame, somewhere among their old friends on the one hand and the army of Javier’s family on the other, really was some kind of a wish come true for Jamie.

Both Jessie and Javier really wanted Jamie to be there, or at least so would they stubbornly insist. It wouldn't be enough to simply have him come over for some cake and coffee on a casual afternoon and without all this crowd. They had done it that way last year, when Jamie excused himself out of the birthday party by claiming he had a night shift precisely on that day (which was not true, by the way). Jessie and Javier clearly were not happy about how it turned out in that event, and so this year they decided to play it differently: Jessie had called Jamie in advance to ask him about his schedule, so they could adjust their party plans to Jamie's timetable.

Why on earth did they care so much? Why did they give a damn? Why would they go to such lengths to ensure Jamie's public solitude and humiliation in front of all those special ones of the happy couple?

Wasn't it enough that they were incessantly euphoric and in love while Jamie still clung onto his closet full of broken hopes and shattered dreams, still with no idea of how and where to begin to put them together? When would they be done with their being so triumphant over Jamie and his failure of a life? Just when?

And Brandon, he wasn’t any better. Jamie shared with him the truth, he explained to him what was going on and how he felt about it, but Brandon – to put it frankly – let him down. He just didn’t know what seemed to be Jamie’s problem. He can’t have taken it seriously. He must have been secretly amused at Jamie playing the drama queen for heaven knows what reason. ‘Man, cut down on the self-pity and grow up’, that must have been what Brandon really thought. Just like anyone else. Brandon turned out to be exactly like anyone else, leaving Jamie so lonely, with nobody to rely on. How unfair was that?

A few more piercing sobs and Jamie had begun to calm down, his swirling emotions extinguishing in spite of himself. As he regained his composure, he started to recall what exactly had happened with much more clarity. In spite of his exhaustion, in his head he went through the events of the past few hours all over again.

Jessie called out of the blue, and that sudden telephone planted unpleasant tingles right under Jamie’s skin. It was a truly amazing phenomenon, in a way and to a certain degree: how a voice which once would take Jamie’s breath away and a mere thought of which would send him to a different dimension of bliss now only had him choking with exasperation and wishing Jessie would just do him a favor and shut up.

Against his own feelings, in their little telephone chat Jamie was being kind and polite towards Jessie, skillfully imitating Jessie’s tone towards him. Restraining himself to keep up the appearances, he barely made it until Jessie hung up. Then, overcome with all the frustration boiling up inside him, he angrily tossed the phone to the sofa – in the process also startling Brandon, who had just been passing by, nuzzling and playing with his favorite pet hamster Frollo. 

‘Overcome’, ‘past the breaking point’, that was what Jamie conceived of his own emotional state at the time. The truth was, however, that he performed that slightly theatrical gesture of throwing his cell phone mostly to make Brandon notice him.

And indeed, Jamie succeeded in drawing Brandon’s attention. Brandon was considerate enough not to ignore Jamie’s approximation of throwing a tantrum. He asked Jamie what the matter was, and upon listening to Jamie’s report, he even tried to give him some advice on how Jamie might get himself out of the awkward situation. The thing was that Brandon’s advice was not overly insightful. In fact, it was little more than a commonplace ‘if you don’t want to go then don’t, if they’re your friends they should understand’. Right, like Jamie was really a total blockhead who wouldn’t have figured something like that on his own in case that could actually work as a solution to his problem. 

There was no connection between Jamie and Brandon; there was no understanding – and worse, no will to understand, as Jamie presumed – of the true depth of Jamie’s emotional crisis on Brandon’s part. Jamie could hear it in the ever so calm tone of Brandon’s voice, as well as in his composed, a little bit confused gaze. Brandon was being very diplomatic with Jamie, but underneath it all, Jamie was sure, there was nothing but amused disbelief hued with derision at how a grown-up man could have such problems as Jamie did, or at how a grown-up man could consider those things problems at all.

Just as Jamie was starting to feel comfortable with his story, just as he was beginning to hope that Brandon may in fact be interested in his circumstances and perhaps even feel sympathetic, Brandon dispelled Jamie’s illusions, summing up Jamie’s heated account of the experiences with his ex with a resigned, somewhat bored: “Erm, I’m sorry, Jamie, I thought I could help you, but I don’t think I can”.

Frankly, Jamie did not expect to end up dismissed by Brandon so fast and so bluntly. If he had, then why would he put on all this show, trying to attract Brandon’s attention to this petty heartbreak drama?

“No, don’t be, it’s not you, it’s just me going, you know, all melodramatic and everything”, Jamie replied mechanically, even though the truth of what he was thinking was an exact opposite of his words. At least the moment he was saying them. “I don’t think anyone can possibly help me, I think I’m just a jerk wallowing in self-pity.” Jamie did not mean it as his own opinion, but rather as a projection of what he had perceived to be Brandon’s opinion of him. 

He could see no contradiction in his own views at the time. It did not even occur to him that Brandon could not possibly consider him a _jerk wallowing in self-pity_ , because he knew next to nothing about Jamie’s story with Jessie, really nothing apart from whatever Jamie had told him barely seconds ago, meaning that they had broken up a few years before and now Jessie wanted to have Jamie come over for his current boyfriend’s birthday party. 

Even as he was saying those lines, Jamie felt like he was on the verge of something irreversible, either exploding or imploding. He once was through that unbearable sensation before since Brandon had moved in – it happened on that evening when Brandon made it clear he was not interested in Jamie as his sexual partner. It was like the whole world had collapsed upon Jamie, but he did not want to make a scene in front of Brandon, so instead he locked himself in the bathroom – with a lame excuse that he was going to take a bath – and stayed there until he almost cried his eyes out and his despair gave way to the fatigue. However, this time an escape route to the bathroom was out of question.

It was humiliating enough to tell Brandon how he felt and receive no compassion, no understanding in return. Jamie had no intention of crying behind a closed door, knowing all the while that the person right beside that wall didn’t care and simply found him ridiculous. Loneliness felt that much heavier when you weren’t alone.

And so he decided to take a walk. “To the malls”, as he himself put it, going as far as to even ask Brandon if he needed anything, to make the appearances in all of their fakeness as real as possible. 

A great deal of things happened since Brandon had begun to live with Jamie: the good, the bad, the worst and the hopeless. Somehow they had survived it all, and it was possibly the case precisely because it was all about Brandon: everything revolved around him and his problems. Now that it came to Jamie’s issues, now that for just a moment Jamie needed to be the important one, the one that mattered – suddenly, for the first time ever, sharing his apartment with Brandon struck him as a burden. 

He couldn’t even burst out crying when he wanted to, the way he wanted to, for how long he wanted to. He was painfully aware of the cold, judging presence right beside him, and all that he knew was that he couldn’t feel at home in his own home anymore.

‘What did I need that for?’, his jaded inner voice assaulted him the moment the front door closed behind his back. ‘Inviting a stranger to live with me, what on earth was I thinking? What did I expect? A prince charming? A brother of mercy? A very special someone to save me?’

That voice was simply relentless. It refused to let go, irritating and mocking Jamie, sprinkling salt over his wounds, as Jamie carried on with his restless search for a place, one single goddamn place in the whole wretched city to have a decent cry.

‘What was I thinking? Why should Brandon give a damn about my teenage drama queen dilemmas?’ Short of breath, Jamie clenched his fists in an attempt to contain his pain and resentment. It did not work. ‘He’s a sex addict who has almost lost a sister to suicide. And I’m a thirty-year old wimp who can’t get over how happy his ex is with that other guy. Like I really couldn’t get a life of my own three years after the breakup, instead of celebrating the turmoil. To someone like Brandon, this must sound like a joke. Hell, it sounds like a joke even to me. I wish someone would understand what I’m going through. But I know it’s just not possible, because it can’t be understood. It can’t be justified. What I feel, what I insist on feeling, how I can’t move on, none of it can be justified.’

His tears rolled down one by one down his cheeks. His chin was all wet and it felt terribly cold against the chill of the April wind. He hardly bothered to wipe it with the back of his hand; in the corner of his eye he noticed how his fingers were trembling, as if they were leaves shaking in the breeze. 

‘What did I expect?’, the sadist within kept inquiring, uncompromising. ‘Did I really think that I can win Brandon? That I can make him love me, or at least make him appreciate and respect me? That’s bullshit. He’s only with me because I’m a convenient creature. I give him no conditions, I never say no, I pretend like it didn’t matter what I wanted, or what’s good for me. And they dig it. They always do. I mean, who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t enjoy a selfless little sucker who lets you do whatever you please, a your-wish-is-my-command kind of moron?’

He bit his lips and bent forward, like the next masochistic thought had broken some sort of mental pillar upon which his backbone was resting.

‘Of course Brandon could never love me. He has no idea who I am in first place. He only knows the false sacrificial angel, and not me. I’ve been just trying to win him over with my fake kindness, like I did with Jessie. Jessie ran away the moment he realized who I really am. And Brandon will, too. I just can’t be loved for who I am. I should have known that all along. I’m better off alone. It’s time to face it. These stupid tears, these hysterical spasms won’t lead me nowhere. Maybe I should act like a man, for once in my life.’

Jamie’s idea of ‘acting like a man’ was rather vague, but nonetheless, the concept had been accompanying him all of his life as the single thing he apparently just could not do. Every time he had this self-defeating urge to insult himself really badly, to make it hurt properly, all he had to do was recall that he was supposed to ‘act like a man’ or ‘be a man’, and in an instant he was choking on the pain all over again. Whatever a real man really was, it definitely did not involve any of Jamie’s defining traits: his sentimentality, his attachment to his own emotions, or his vulnerability, often labeled by the people around him simply as self-pity. 

When he was finally too tired to cry or even to think, Jamie slowly got up and aimlessly walked ahead. His eyes were burning; a certain dizziness prevented him from keeping a steady pace. With nothing better to do, he decided he might as well try to observe the surroundings a little bit more carefully than until then. 

At this time of evening, the park was still, but not dead. Some people jogged Jamie by, a pair of headphones usually covering their ears. Jamie wondered what kind of music they were doing their running to. Brandon was a jogger himself, and while exercising, he listened to classical piano pieces. At first Jamie found that slightly unusual, but the music Brandon had on his iPod was truly beautiful and touching. As he did with clothes, Brandon had an amazing taste in music. Jamie could understand how those piano tracks would help Brandon’s mind stay calm and composed while his body remained invigorated and focused. 

There were also people of all ages and all walks of life walking their dogs for a goodnight stroll. There went a magnificently proud German shepherd, a delightful lively mongrel with an almost curly tail, and an originally brown-furred, wolfishly beautiful malamute. Looking at all these, Jamie couldn’t help the feeling of envy. He adored all kinds of dogs there were, the unquestionable love of his life still remaining with Horus, a St. Bernard’s dog Jamie grew up with and walked on a leash since Horus on his fours was roughly little Jamie’s size. They also had a dog with Jessie – Herc, a mutt from a city pound. Or to be precise, the dog was Jamie’s birthday gift to Jessie, so that when Jessie decided to move out, Jamie had no second thoughts on giving up Herc to him. Herc belonged with Jessie, after all, and besides, it would be really difficult for a person living by himself, like Jamie, to take a proper care of a dog. Deep down in his mind, Jamie kept wishing that maybe one day, when he would share his apartment with someone yet again – which officially was, of course, out of question – he could get himself another dog, confident that he and his flat-mate would have now all that it took to grant their pet a proper care. Maybe if Brandon had nothing against it… – Jamie shook his head and interrupted this thought before it went too far.

There were also the couples taking their romantic spring evening walks. Holding hands, kissing, hugging, giggling, enjoying their company in their own little world made for two. In a way, Jamie found these childlike, or even childish, displays of affection truly endearing. Those people boldly embodied the longing shared by every human being, the longing experienced by Jamie with special power and intensity: the longing to belong. The longing to be someone’s. 

There were so many things going on around Jamie. They were colorful and intriguing, they were fun. The world was that much bigger than Jamie. In an amazing way, this awareness consoled him more than anything. Suddenly he didn’t feel that lonely anymore.

The point was, each and every single of these things somehow, in an unexplainable way lead Jamie’s thoughts back to Brandon. With the blaze of his agitation now safely extinguished, Jamie began to realize how he really missed his roommate. At a moment’s notice, nothing else seemed to count anymore. He only wanted to see his face, to hear his voice, to make sure he was still there in Jamie’s life.

Not surprisingly, with the peace of mind and soul newly restored within himself, Jamie started to regret his emotional outburst from no longer than a while ago. ‘What was all that about again?’, he couldn’t help but ask himself, even though his eyes and his throat still carried the physical traces of the recent flood. The rage, hopelessness and anguish slowly gave way to an immense feeling of shame. ‘It was not worth it’, Jamie decided, bad premonitions creeping inside his mind.

He was still angry with Jessie and worried about Javier’s birthday party, but none of that was of any importance at the moment. The matter with Brandon was much more urgent; with Brandon who, as it now occurred to Jamie with an almost blinding clarity, really meant well and really wanted to help – and who got insolently rejected for not giving the correct answers and being unable to read Jamie’s mind. 

The blood in Jamie’s veins seemed to have frozen for a moment as it dawned upon him that with just one careless, selfish fit he may have irreversibly damaged the bristle budding bond the two of them had built taking such caution and so much effort. And why? Because he couldn’t trust Brandon, that was why.

_Because he couldn’t trust._

He had always been convinced that trust was costly, that it only came with a huge price that Jamie usually didn’t feel he could afford. Why all the hurt, why all the agony, I’m too sensitive for all that – he would be thinking, never paying attention to the conceited tone of his own thoughts that were supposed to bring him safety from the cruel world he was so scared of and he couldn’t always understand. And yet, the truth was that rather than misplaced trust, it was the mistrust that destroyed Jamie’s life, his relationships, his innocence and his faith in other people. Whatever he may have been saying or doing, in his heart of hearts he did realize that it was nothing else but mistrust that killed the love between him and Jessie, driving Jessie away. And now it looked like he was going to make that very same mistake with Brandon.

Unconsciously, a number of teardrops dripped once more through Jamie’s pitch-black eyelashes and down his face. This time, however, those were no tears of indolent chagrin. Those were the impatient tears of the will to act, to rewind, to undo the damage – matched with a fervent hope down inside that it still wasn’t too late.


	16. Come on with the rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Encouraged by Brandon, Jamie recounts the story of his previous relationship, and he does not spare the details of how it went down and how it continues to have an impact on Jamie's life. Nourished by Brandon's nonjudgmental and sympathetic listening, Jamie is surprised to realize that the grip of the past heartbreak on him has actually become much weaker than he thought it is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's taking much longer than I initially planned, but we can now start the countdown for the story finale. Stay tuned for the (estimated) last three chapters to come!

As much as Jamie considered his need to see Brandon and take back his own silly, overdramatized behavior to be urgent, he surprised himself by being reasonable enough not to rush the things. He was aware of the fact that on that evening his was the case of rather violent mood swings: from the abyss of entitled despair, through self-doubt and massive feelings of inferiority, through embarrassment, up until the will to fix it all and make it like nothing had ever happened. Moods came and went, and just because the wish to make amends had emerged on Jamie’s part, it did not mean it was there to stay. Who could guarantee it was a mature resolution, rather than another whim Jamie happened to be going through? If anyone, that was definitely not Jamie: he knew himself well enough to approach his emotional states with caution and distance. Of course, it was not like Jamie had always been so sensible and rational about his own mental states – the major difference was that now he knew better. 

He earned some extra time by actually going ‘to the malls’ which had served as the lame excuse for his hysterical flight earlier that evening. He bought some groceries for the next day, specifically those that Brandon needed to make his favorite blended soups, which were about the only homemade main course that he accepted as his dinner. Jamie noticed before that they had run out of fresh ingredients in their refrigerator, meaning that the next day Brandon would likely end up with that fake Chinese instant noodles shit he seemed to enjoy enough not to put in his mouth anything else whenever refrigerator and the cupboards were otherwise empty, as if going to the store five minutes of walk away demanded too much of a strain on him. Brandon’s eating habits were simply outrageous; Jamie failed at comprehending how this classy, stylish, well-groomed man could be so neglecting of himself in specific areas, especially those most intimately related to his own body and health, such as eating or sleeping. 

Upon leaving the shop, it suddenly occurred to Jamie that it had got really late. While away and engulfed in his inner storm, he had completely lost his sense of time. Before he made it back home, it would already be well past eleven. He had to consider the possibility that Brandon may already have been asleep at the time. 

The thought of not being able to talk to him straight away, of not being able to make it all up to him was making Jamie itch with irritation. Deep inside him, however, an even more powerful emotion seemed to have a grip on him, controlling the darkest of the corners of his soul: fear. 

An irrational, and at the same time somehow very real, fear that Brandon might not be waiting there for him anymore. 

This fear prompted Jamie to walk faster, so he was quite warm and slightly short of breath the moment he reached his apartment. He sneaked into the doorway and, relieved to find Brandon’s shoes and overcoat exactly where they had been a few hours earlier, he undressed and proceeded to the kitchen annex to unpack the groceries. 

As Brandon was nowhere in sight, it seemed that he actually had gone to sleep already. Jamie decided to go to the bathroom first to brush his teeth and take a quick shower, so as not to bother Brandon with his midnight walking from the bedroom to the bathroom and back again. Only then did Jamie quietly enter the room, where to his surprise he found a completely awake Brandon playing on the bed with their hamsters. 

Startled, Jamie stopped by the door, confusion paired with growing anxiety painted on his face. Conversely, Brandon showed no signs of puzzlement whatsoever, which was no wonder, given that he must have heard Jamie coming back. 

He gave Jamie a somewhat covert look of those incredible green eyes of his, and the stare was truly difficult to read. It seemed dispassionate, perhaps even harsh. It was hard to tell if he was angry with Jamie, or bored, or dismissive and derisive. Whatever it was, it did not seem like a cordial welcome, and this thought immediately made Jamie’s heart race – and not in a good way. 

And the awareness that he had to be the one to say something first, if any words were to be exchanged at all, did not exactly help. 

With his head too empty to afford as much as a single coherent thought, Jamie squeezed from the inside as much bravery as he possibly could, only to come up with a veritably impressive line. “I… um, you see, I didn’t want to wake you up.” Because why not start with an excuse even if no one actually accused you of anything, at least not verbally? In a nervous attempt not to provoke any response that he might find uneasy, he swiftly added a cheesy line flavored with an artificial chuckle: “I can see that you’ve taken over the nocturnal lifestyle from these little guys, though.”

The attempt failed completely. Ignoring Jamie’s words as if he hadn’t heard them at all, Brandon observed with that metallic tone of his: “Those malls must have been quite a long way from here, huh?” And just as Jamie bit his lower lip, trying to tame the mounting embarrassment and tension within, Brandon added an unexpected notice. “I was worried, you know.”

A wave of heat struck Jamie all of a sudden, a wave of relief, endearment, but also shame. As if he couldn’t take the hit and stay on his own two feet, he had to lean against the now closed bedroom door. 

“Um… well, yes, I got a little lost along the way, I guess”, he stammered as he run his slightly shaky fingers through his hair. He felt so stupid and so small he found it impossible to lay his gaze straight upon Brandon’s piercing eyes. 

As much as he wanted to rush to Brandon’s side and cling to him to hear Brandon reassure him it was all right, he was also too afraid to make an even microscopic move towards the bed where Brandon was lying. He had done wrong to the person he loved by doubting if that person even cared at all; now he felt he had no right to expect from Brandon really anything. “Brandon, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I…” Gripped by the sense of guilt and uncertain if any words could convince Brandon now to take him back, after all those underserved accusations that Jamie had thrown at him, Jamie eventually gave up the futile attempts to explain his irrational outburst in a concise classy manner. Instead, he simply repeated: “I’m sorry, that’s all”, with a resigned tone. 

Brandon nodded his head in a gesture that said virtually nothing about what was going on in his mind. He scrutinized Jamie with his icy eyes for a few more seconds, and most likely for the first time since they had met Jamie found himself wishing Brandon would look away, when it was always the opposite that had been the problem. 

And then, Jamie was taken aback when Brandon moved the scurrying hamsters to the side of the bed to make some space, with a simple “You should go to bed now. It’s late”.

So he still cared. So Jamie somehow managed not to discourage him from caring. So he somehow cared more than he was angry or amused with Jamie’s antics. 

Jamie was genuinely touched. And, as much as he was afraid his insatiability would lead him to a dead end like it always did, he wanted more, and was willing to take a chance to get it.

After all, he only wanted to make sure if the person he held so dear was actually there for him. If Brandon really was his ally, if Jamie really could trust him and open up to him. What was so wrong with that wish, anyway?

As he timidly approached Brandon, one step at a time, Jamie let out an uptight exhale before he inquired with an almost lethal dose of insecurity: “Do you think I could… hold you?”

Brandon gave Jamie that look again. This time it didn’t confuse Jamie all that much, but still it was a sincerely soothing sensation to witness Brandon nod his head affirmatively and reply with an extremely effusive “Uh-huh”. 

Reluctant and unconvincing as it may have sounded, for Brandon it was virtually an invitation, and Jamie could not just let it slip. Not right now, not that he needed so desperately to have someone right beside him, to know that someone was right there for him. There was this beautiful picture with this gorgeous man right in front Jamie’s eyes, and Jamie really wanted to enter that picture and become a part of it; doing so seemed enough for him to overcome his fears and second-thoughts. 

Slowly but steadily, Jamie approached the bedside and took his usual place by the wall, behind Brandon’s back. Careful not to crush by accident any of the hamsters running around the bed at the time, he lay his head close to Brandon’s and he buried his face into Brandon’s shoulder, at the same time embracing Brandon’s waist with his arms. 

Brandon’s smell, the raw, sexy scent of his skin coupled with the whiffs of his cool eau de cologne and invigorating shower gel, had an unexpectedly soothing effect over Jamie’s pounding heart. Just by holding Brandon like this, he felt like he was at home. Or rather, back home – finally. Now he found it hard to believe he had doubted so easily where his home was, or even if he had one. 

As he rested his hand upon Brandon’s, Jamie realized his fingers were still slightly trembling. Yet, he decided not to withdraw his hand. He had made up his mind to show Brandon what he was made of, so if that was the case – if shivering fingers were indeed what he was made of – then so it had to be. 

“I want you to know it all, Brandon. I really do.” With his eyes closed, like he was reciting a well-memorized text, Jamie relaxed and gave into the security and togetherness that Brandon’s body warmth right beside him made him feel like. “It’s just that… I’m afraid, so friggin afraid, you see?”

He felt Brandon’s fingers slide down his hand, encouraging it to turn over and open up. When it did, it put an instant smile on Jamie’s face as he felt the pinch of a hamster’s tiny paws tiptoeing against the skin of his palm. Brandon apparently was guarding there the little creature with his own hand, making sure it wouldn’t fall down. Somehow, there was so much sweetness in that simple gesture on Brandon’s part – it was so lovable to know that among all his reluctance against getting physical, Brandon had found his own original ways to show his tenderness – that it was as if Jamie was starting to let go of his fears completely.

Nevertheless, Brandon’s plain and expected question made Jamie cringe on the inside. “But what is it you’re afraid of?”

So there was no running away now. No traces of Brandon willing to give it a try and read Jamie’s mind. Jamie had to explain it all, and he had no time whatsoever for any second thoughts now. 

Jamie moved his other hand upwards to give the hamster, currently busy nibbling on his thumb, a gentle pat. Partially having regained his composure, he swallowed, then he began: “I’m afraid of how you will react. I’m afraid that you’ll just say what everyone else does… that I’ve only got myself to blame, that it’s not like it’s the end of the world, that it’s no reason to carry on feeling sorry for myself until the end of time. Like I didn’t know all that even without the help of my good-natured advisors.” He sighed and lifted his gaze to meet Brandon’s eyes, and he emphasized his point. “I don’t want to tell anyone how I feel only to hear something like that. And I don’t want _you_ to think about me something like that, either.” 

Brandon wasn’t someone who would end up surprised too easily, so to this confession by Jamie he also replied with a stoic nod. And with a very Brandon-like reassurance: “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. But if you do, I can just listen and say nothing”. 

With two fingers of his free hand, Jamie rubbed against the hamster’s fuzzy back, for a moment focusing solely on that activity. He was pondering over Brandon’s earnest proposal. Brandon was being fair in his telling Jamie what he could offer to him. He certainly wasn’t the ideal listener that Jamie had fantasized about. He was flesh and bone, a living person with his own perception of reality, and not a mirror to Jamie’s thoughts and emotions, programmed to make Jamie feel unconditionally understood, accepted and – which Jamie himself didn’t like to admit how much he yearned for it – special. So, the question was if Jamie could take Brandon’s listening as it was, and not as he dreamed it would be.

Could he?

Yes, Brandon was different – both from Jamie and from the perfect mirror that Jamie had thought he wanted by his side not to ever feel misunderstood and lonely anymore. … But was that difference really such a bad thing? Was it really some kind of a threat? 

Wasn’t there a greater value in being different than being the same? If there wasn’t, then why Jamie would even want anyone else around him? 

If all that he wanted was his own clone, then he should have been better off alone. But he wasn’t, and there was no denying it.

Suddenly alert to these thoughts and empowered enough to take the chance, Jamie squeezed Brandon’s hand. Perhaps for the first time ever, he consciously reveled in the sensation of being so close to someone so different.

“I want you to know me, Brandon”, he uttered a simplest nutshell digested from the abundance of all that was going on inside him. “How about you? Do you want to know me?”

Brandon gave him another acknowledging nod, but soon he emphasized: “I don’t want to let you down”. 

Jamie’s pulse ticked nervously as he remembered that all that time he had been cherishing his feelings of abandonment and self-pity, Brandon must have been struggling with remorse and maybe even feelings of inadequacy which Jamie’s hysteria enforced on him. Still, Brandon’s answer made Jamie breathe out with clear relief.

“It’s not your fault that I can’t trust others.” He smiled and leant even closer to cling with his cheek to Brandon’s. As it was late at night, Brandon’s micro-stubble, although invisible, was already tickling, making Jamie’s face flush with a tingling sensation. As the warmth was spreading deeper and deeper within his body, Jamie’s anxiety began to fade away. Something told him that whatever Brandon would say or do from now on, it would be alright. It wouldn’t matter. What mattered was that Brandon was right there – that he was there for Jamie. Put in that perspective, everything else seemed nothing but details. 

Jamie was all willing now to go down that road. The realization that after giving his deepest secrets away there would be no turning back did not paralyze him anymore. In fact, he believed he wouldn’t even need to go back. 

“You see, I’ve only had one relationship in my life. My partner’s name was Jessie. We knew each other since back in high school, but we only started to date when we were in college. We were together for over seven years. I’ve always been rather afraid of people and afraid of showing them who I really was, so it had never occurred to me I could actually be with someone. Especially since I realized I was gay. And yet, then there was Jessie. He had found me. I thought it must have been destiny, like it was simply meant to be. I loved him like crazy.”

When Jamie paused, Brandon replied with another nod that certainly didn’t reveal much. “I see”, he murmured. Jamie felt down on his fingers Brandon’s hand patting the hamster and Jamie’s hand in the process, as if to encourage him. Jamie responded by rubbing his thumb against the hamster’s back, tracing it along the hamster’s spine until he could rest it upon Brandon’s palm. 

He held Brandon a little closer before he continued:”We’ve been through a lot together, a lot of good and bad times. It wasn’t long since we’d hooked up that his mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was there for Jessie and his father when she got sick and then died. They shared those moments with me… I mean they let me in, I was a part of it all, I was one of them. It wasn’t easy, but I felt like I was doing something I was good at. It seemed that they needed me. It seemed that I was making a difference. I had never felt anything like that being with another person. I was sure that if somebody lets you in and keeps you close during such lows of their life, nothing could ever possibly tear you apart.” 

Jamie stopped for a few seconds, partially to take the time to regroup the things to say and begin a new thread, partially to encourage Brandon to react. Brandon stayed silent and remained as blank-faced as always. As his look traced Jamie’s eyes, however, it was calm and attentive. Realizing that Brandon simply did not want to interrupt him, Jamie returned the gaze. He took a moment to trace the contours of Brandon’s symmetrical, manly face; it made him feel that much more tranquil. 

Then, his eyes still fixed upon Brandon’s face, Jamie resumed his story. “And for a long time it really was exactly the way I had dreamt it. It was wonderful. I’m not sure when it was that the first cracks had begun to show, all I know is that at the time I must have missed them. … I started to get jealous. And not quite of other guys, even though that was sometimes the case, too. You see, even back in high school Jessie was the most popular boy around: the star of the basketball team, handsome, smart, charming. He always did whatever he liked, he knew how to assert himself. He would only take the best things life had to offer. We didn’t really like each other back then, but the truth was that deep down inside I just couldn’t believe that someone that gorgeous might be attracted to someone like me, for whatever reason. … A few years later Jessie became a photographer. And he was good at it. We were already together then, and I was very happy for him, so proud of him… and besides, you know, he would always… He’d always say how beautiful I was, and how I inspired him…” An unexpected spasm in the throat blocked Jamie’s words for a moment. His mind fled back to those times when an utterly amazing man, someone so beautiful and unique, kept reminding Jamie of how Jamie himself was beautiful and unique in his eyes, resuscitating Jamie’s self-esteem in ways previously unimaginable. The memory of how it felt to be thus appreciated, or even adored, was still painfully vivid. It still had a part of Jamie wishing he could go back to those days, to reclaim that feeling. 

Because if someone that exceptional found Jamie exceptional, then it can’t have been a lie – and yet it was a lie. Jessie took away his love and appreciation, and now Jamie was disappointed with himself to discover that even after all these years it still hurt and angered him, like Jessie had robbed him of something that rightfully belonged to him. 

Shaking off the unsettlement within, Jamie breathed deeply and continued his account. “But then we finished the college, and while I was still studying for my veterinary degree, Jessie’s career was gaining momentum. I was either cramming until my head would explode or working my ass off during my internships. When got back home, I always had some more studying to do, it seemed like there was no end to it. I had no time and no energy left for anything else. And all the while, Jessie was having the time of his life, he was getting so glamorous, you know? All those events, parties, business trips, all those honors and all those fascinating people from the great wide world that he’d get to know… He’d always tell me all about it with such excitement and such satisfaction, and I, well, I started to feel like I didn’t belong there with him. I started to feel inferior.”

After this confession, for a moment Brandon seemed puzzled. “But why would you…?” He broke off and shook his head, like he remembered he had promised not to give any verbal reaction to anything Jamie was saying. This exaggerated self-control on his part was somewhat endearing and it made Jamie smile. “Go on”, asked Brandon, and so Jamie did, making an attempt to address the question that Brandon had not finished.

“Maybe it’s because in fact I had always felt inferior to him. Since we had been committed, initially most things revolved around me, with Jessie trying to convince how great and worthwhile a person I was, and how lucky Jessie was to have me around. And those were the things I’d always wanted so bad for someone to let me know, and which I felt nobody ever really had. I can’t even explain how much joy it all would give me. But then, at some point Jessie moved on from that stage. He began to focus more on himself, his own ambitions and his own plans in life. We weren’t that inseparable anymore. He outgrew me, I couldn’t keep up. He fed on other people’s admiration and fondness of him, and me, I acted like a spoiled child.”

The bitterness of this difficult recollection was alleviated by a sympathetic stroke of Brandon’s hand upon Jamie’s. Then, Brandon inquired: “And so you had a fight?”, giving Jamie a slightly worried look. 

Jamie lingered with his head to Brandon’s arm, staying that way until he decided he got the next part of the story right and could look up at Brandon once more. “No, actually we didn’t, at least not so fast. Now I know that it was my mistake. It would have turned out for the better if we had had that fight right then, but just I couldn’t lay my cards on the table, you know? My ego and my self-love wouldn’t let me.” His face darkened with a somber smile.. “So instead, I started to go dropping clues…. as in, really indirect suggestions that something was going on. I considered myself levelheaded and in control of my own demands, but the truth was that day after day, I was simply killing Jessie’s feelings for me, as well as our bond. I should have told him straight in the face what the matter was, but instead, I chose being distant and playing the cold one. I was becoming withdrawn. I wouldn’t show any interest in his life, or in his successes, or in whatever moved him. He was confused, I could tell, but he didn’t try too hard to find out what it all was about. And so, we only fell further apart, which was of course to the complete reverse of my intentions. After all, I wanted to make him give me more attention, and not ignore me even more. So I fought for that attention of his, I really did – with means such as sarcastic remarks, putting him down, or bashing his friends. I’d lost my way completely, I suppose.” 

Brandon’s nodding gestures seemed to be getting more and more sympathetic. Jamie sensed it as Brandon’s index finger traced the palm of his hand – and without giving the feeling like he had intended to pet the hamster, but missed the target. “I’m sorry”, he murmured, confirming Jamie’s impression.

Jamie had to admit it was a surprising moment to hear that expression of compassion. After all, he had just explained in much detail how he blew up his relationship by deliberately hurting the person he claimed to love the most. The selfless angel that Jamie would always pose to be now had revealed his true face, his malevolent, spiteful side. Was it really Jamie that Brandon should have felt sorry about?

“Aren’t you scared of me?” A self-ironic smile was supposed to ease, or at least conceal, Jamie’s mounting insecurity. “I mean, aren’t you scared that I might just not be as generous and lovable as I pretend to be?”

Brandon looked like he sincerely didn’t get Jamie’s point. “Why should I be scared? I don’t know how I would cope with a situation like yours. Maybe I’d do exactly what you did.”

No, you wouldn’t, you couldn’t possibly think of the situation in such a twisted way, and you wouldn’t complicate the simplest things the way I did, thought Jamie. But then, a sudden revelation dawned on him. The truth was really everything it seemed. Brandon really had it in himself to hear the darker parts of Jamie’s story without judging him. Calm, focused, unassuming, Brandon had really been to too many places and seen too much of what the world can be to be disgusted or shocked by Jamie’s vices and his drama tendencies.

And what a sweet, unanticipated discovery it was to find that Brandon could accept him in ways that Jamie could not have imagined before, exactly because they were not the same. The prize was worth the courage that it had taken for Jamie to confide in Brandon.

“Thank you”, Jamie replied simply, snuggling into Brandon’s arm with a smile. Then he sighed, as another lighthearted moment of intimacy with Brandon was interrupted by a recollection of what Jamie had yet to say. “And eventually we did have a fight, a really tough one. I happened to have some seriously hard time with my internship, an accident had happened which made me really distressed. All the while, Jessie had been away with some session out of town, or something. Essentially, he’d been gone for a few days to bask in some glory and have an overall blast. I was so mad, as if he had been the one who did me wrong, as if he’d done that on purpose, leaving me there all alone like he wanted to make a point that I could never be as happy as he was. And so I lost it. I attacked him almost the moment he’d entered the apartment upon his return. And it didn’t matter if he…” Jamie broke off, the suddenly real memories of that fateful day spiced with a renewed sense of shame creeping under his skin. “It didn’t matter if he was simply happy, so damn happy and if he only wanted to share all that with his partner. … Eventually, I found myself telling him that I felt sorry for him, for that little world of his, all so fake and empty. And then…” Closing his eyes, Jamie allowed himself to relive that moment, like a surging wave that was about to swallow him whole. “Then Jessie gave me that look that I still can’t forget… and he said to me, perfectly calm and so convinced: _No, Jamie. It’s your world that’s fake and empty_.”

Jamie exhaled, letting go of the tension that had kept him alert until then. In a way, he relished in the way that bringing back those memories had hurt him – and that was because now he knew that the worst part was already over. Done. Behind him.

As if in a caress, Brandon ran his fingers through Jamie’s hair. He didn’t refer anyhow to anything Jamie had just said, but in some strange way, perhaps by the subdued sound of Brandon’s sigh, Jamie seemed to know that Brandon was aware exactly of how upsetting the memory of that fight with Jessie was to Jamie, and how heartbreaking Jessie’s words sounded to him even now. And funny it should even be that way, because it was Jamie who had mercilessly assaulted his then partner, and whatever Jessie had responded was completely in self-defense. Yet, the major difference was that Jessie knew that Jamie’s accusations and grudges were total nonsense, while Jamie did believe Jessie’s opinion of him to be true. That was why it hurt so much and for so long.

“And that’s why you broke up?”, Brandon asked, apparently trying to make sense of why Jamie was telling him all this.

It may have not been exactly so, but Jamie nodded nonetheless. “I think it was the decisive point. For a couple of days that followed I was in a stupor, terribly down and terribly hurt, even though it was me who had attacked him and not the other way round. You see, the thing was my words may have hurt him, but he didn’t believe in anything I said about him, rightfully so. However, what he said about me… he was absolutely right. You could say that it was a cold shower that made me come round.” Stretching a little his arms, slightly numbed by those long minutes of keeping them in a rather unnatural position, Jamie granted himself a few precious seconds to rethink what had actually happened to his relationship, and perhaps to gain a brand new perspective in the process. “I had come to my senses to some extent. I apologized to Jessie. I wanted to fix it, I wanted to fix myself. He accepted my apology and for a moment I thought it was going to be alright. And then one day, a few weeks after we had that fight, he told me it was over. He said he was moving out and he didn’t want me to fix anything, to change anything or to make anything right, because it was not working anymore, and there was no us anymore. And… that he had met someone.”

Brandon’s searching gaze had suddenly turned cold. “Did he cheat on you?” His tone was as emotionless as ever, but the stern look about his eyes said very clearly that he would stand up for Jamie without as much as a second of doubt – and also that Jessie was lucky not to be there within Brandon’s arm range at the moment. It was so reassuring, and deeply touching, to know that Brandon was on Jamie’s side even now, having heard about what Jamie had done to damage his own relationship. 

“He insisted he didn’t, but I thought I knew better than that.” Jamie’s body let out a tiny shiver as if it had gone through the humiliation and the aching all over again. He had to swallow that sore feeling before he could continue. “Especially because they had met precisely during that infamous session out of town. So I broke down. The world as I knew it had shattered. It took me a few months to shake it off, and it was only then that I began to realize Jessie was telling me the truth. I remembered who it was that I had loved so much, and that was a fair, straightforward guy who never had to lie, because he never was afraid of anything. So no, he didn’t cheat on me. He and that other guy, they liked each other ever since they had met, but Jessie wouldn’t sleep with him until he broke up with me.”

Brandon accepted Jamie’s explanation by rather clearly relaxing the look upon his face. “Well…”, he nodded, “if that’s the case, then that’s okay, I guess.” Pondering for a while, he added, “I think that he respected you. I’m sorry it turned out the way it did.” 

There was something so amazingly accurate about Brandon’s words that it almost made Jamie gasp. “Thanks, Brandon”, he replied, shaking his head a little. Jamie was a greedy creature, so it hadn’t mattered if Jessie respected him or not. Respect simply hadn’t been enough. “You’re right, he respected me, much more than I respected him, unfortunately. And…” Jamie decided that even his inner exhibitionist had had enough of those intense and often upsetting recollections, so it was about time to wrap it up. “And, you see, that’s about it. We keep in touch, now I can say we’ve become friends again. I’ve even come to like Jessie’s new boyfriend a little, even though the guy often gets on my nerves. But… the thing is that on days like those, like Jessie’s boyfriend’s birthday party, I simply can’t enjoy their companion. All I can think of is that I’m such a failure and I don’t deserve to be loved, or to be close with another human being. That’s what makes it so difficult.”

“But that’s not true”, Brandon disagreed, and even if those were just words, they cheered Jamie on and flattered his vanity. “You don’t have to feel this way. If he’s your friend… I think he still loves you, only in a different way. If they want you to be there, they must mean it. They want you there.”

Naïve as it sounded it was really sweet, and it made Jamie smile as he peeked at Brandon’s confident face. “I don’t know, I mean, why would they want me after all? I gave them no single reason to be fond of me, to the contrary. I usually get the impression that it’s more like they want to feel like they’re being fair, or that they feel sorry for me, and that’s the only reason why they’re trying too hard not to lose touch. … I can’t help what I’m feeling.” Jamie bit his lip and hesitated, but deciding to see it through and to stay true from the start to the very end, he uttered that most personal line about his weakest spot. “On days like those, I just get so immensely lonely, and I really hate that.”

Brandon sounded unconvinced. “Yeah, perhaps… but you said yourself that quite some time has passed. If they were really faking it, they would have stopped by now.” Silence ensued, and only a microscopic frown on Brandon’s forehead, visible to Jamie possibly just because he was looking at him at a really close range, hinted that Brandon was in the process of thinking and wasn’t done with that topic yet, which prevented Jamie from inserting his reply too soon. “Maybe you should just tell him about it? I mean what you’re telling me about right now. You should tell that to him, too. Tell him how you feel. If he really is your friend, he’ll understand. And if not… well, at least then you’ll know where you stand.”

Jamie snorted and rolled his eyes. Who would have thought Brandon was such an expert at finding easy solutions? “Another serious conversation? Great, can’t wait.” He smiled with a corner of his lips. “I’d rather spend an evening with you, Brandon”, he confessed as he cuddled the man as if in a reward for his patience with Jamie he had shown throughout the last few hours. “But I suppose you’ve got the point. Playing my cards open may have never been my strongest suit, but I can’t keep avoiding it like that for all my life.”

Brandon consistently nodded – Jamie thought he must have been doing it by the sheer force of a reflex, whether he in fact agreed with the speaker notwithstanding. “I don’t like playing my cards open either, but you see, you’ll talk to him once and that’s it, either you two will still be friends, or once and for all you will be free from unwanted parties.” Brandon’s smile was a rare resource, and he usually smiled in that peculiar, ambiguous way, more like a half-smile; it seemed you couldn’t really tell if he was genuinely smiling at a given situation, or if he was being sarcastic at your expecting that this should be a moment when he smiled. Anyhow, this time he shared with Jamie another of that half-smiles, and Jamie enthusiastically accepted the proposal with a chuckle. Whatever the reason for Brandon’s smile was, the smile itself made Jamie easy and warm on the inside. 

“You’re right”, Jamie admitted with a sigh. “I should do that, this is the right thing to do.” Then he decided he was ready not to think about Jessie, Javier and their triangle story anymore for the rest of the day. Not even a single thought. Brandon deserved all of Jamie’s focus to be finally shifted towards him. “Thank you for listening to me… to all this”, he expressed his sincere gratitude as he wrapped his arms around Brandon’s neck. 

Brandon replied to Jamie – how unexpectedly – with a nod. At least Jamie now was sure that Brandon wasn’t that uncomfortable with Jamie’s face so close to his, if even in this position he could afford all the nodding. “That’s okay”, he responded, following with a concerned: “Are you feeling better now?”, a line which still echoed with Brandon’s confusion at Jamie’s erratic behavior from not so long ago. 

Jamie showed a subtle smile. The answer to that question seemed obvious, and yet he had the impression he really shouldn’t go for the obvious – he owed much more honesty to both Brandon and himself. 

So, was he feeling better?

What did that conversation change within Jamie?

The first thing he thought of was the muscles. His belly, his chest and diaphragm had been so tense, like preparing for a hostile attack. Now they were loose, completely off guard. They must have realized there was no reason to remain so cautious all the time, now that Jamie had Brandon standing by him. 

And then there was his head. Before it had been so full of gloom, all the resentment, all the shame, all that desperation, and misery. All of these had died down, like a flame of a candle –not like one abruptly blown by the wind, however, but rather like one that had reached its natural end and burnt out. Jamie didn’t know yet if these feelings were still relevant or not, if they would still come back to him. Probably they would – feelings may seem fleeting, they may let go every so often, but they usually come back, because it is them that make you who you are, or rather it is who you are that makes them what they are, as Jamie knew perfectly from his own experience. But now, he felt strong enough to resist them should they come back. Something inside him was now opening to a possibility he had been rejecting so firmly for so long: that maybe, after all, there was more to his life than he gave it credit for after he and Jessie broke up. Maybe that heartbreak he had faced, and all those imperfect, sickening things he had learnt about himself in the process, really did not define everything that Jamie was. 

For now, his mind was calm and clear, just as calm and clear was Brandon’s breathing that Jamie felt against his own wrist. 

So Jamie looked up at Brandon again, this time like he properly should look at the man who made him realize his life might not have been over. “Yes, I am. Thanks”, he admitted, hand on his heart. Holding himself closer to Brandon, he placed his head over his shoulder, never taking his gaze away from that pair of exquisite olive green eyes. “You are not judging me, are you?” 

Of course he wasn’t. He didn’t even know what the hell Jamie wanted from him again now. And neither was Jamie asking a question – that was more of a rhetorical expression of disbelief on his part. 

“But what should I even judge?”, Brandon replied with a clearly puzzled overtone, as he embraced Jamie lightly with his lanky arms, leaving one of his hands loose to pat every once in a while their crazed hamsters who were currently chasing each other across the bed.

Jamie chuckled, pulling himself closer to Brandon’s firm, wiry form. “Well, I’m sure there’s always something you could find if you do care to judge someone.” He pulled himself up on an elbow and gave Brandon a solemn stare. “I mean, really, everything. Starting from the way I have smashed my own relationship, through how I’m still feeling sorry for myself, or how I treat my ex, or how I can’t just let it go. Doesn’t that bother you? Not any of this?”   
Apparently, Brandon still didn’t get it. “Why should your feelings bother me?” Right, normally it was a huge problem for Jamie – that very attitude on Brandon’s part. But right now, under the circumstances, it was more than precious. Jamie burst out with a giggle.

“Brandon, you’re wonderful, you know that? Because I do”, he announced. 

Undisturbed by what he must have thought of as another display of irrationality on Jamie’s part, Brandon carried on with his thought. “I only think that you must have really cared about the guy.”

Jamie closed his eyes, resting his forehead comfortably against Brandon’s neck. “I did.” Something about the past tense form that he had used, matched with Brandon’s scent and body warmth covering him all around, made Jamie feel like he had been electrified. Had he really just said that? “I did. A lot”, he repeated now much more fervently, his heart rate leaping in an instant so much that it would be surprising if it didn’t pass onto Brandon and make him tremble. 

So here he was. Here they were. The moment was here, too. What was the point of carrying on with the pretense anymore? Jamie had been quite sure of his feelings towards Brandon, and now he was also sure that his interest in a lifetime of misery had significantly diminished, too. He didn’t want to shy away anymore. Instead, he wanted to look the chance straight in the face and say it out loud: ‘I want to take you’.

“… But it’s all in the past now. Maybe it’s time to move on?” Jamie gazed intently into Brandon’s face, making it his point that he was demanding Brandon’s opinion. Overcome with emotion, Jamie could barely hold himself in.

Nevertheless, he also found it hardly surprising when in those delightful eyes of Brandon’s he saw nothing but oblivion. 

“Sure, that would be a good thing to do. Why should some past issues go on ruining your mood.” Brandon’s trademark deadpan tone, irritating as it was under such emotionally elevated circumstances, was at the same time so lovable that Jamie couldn’t help the laughter.

“You’re unbelievable”, he insisted, shaking his head. Brandon’s eyebrows rose like they were pumped by a spring, his expression screaming ‘Did I say something wrong?’, which rather naturally made Jamie laugh even harder.

“Come on, it’s bedtime, let’s go to sleep”, he tucked on Brandon’s sleeve, ignoring the fact that actually they had been in bed for about an hour, so ‘bedtime’ may not have been the most accurate expression. Brandon remained disoriented, but still – or perhaps owing to which – he didn’t object.

So Jamie had to try the whole ‘moving on’ talk once more the other day. Admittedly, that was for the better. Maybe he was being too heated up. Brandon certainly wasn’t ready for such a conversation yet, and besides, the two of them had already gone through their fair share of turbulent sentiments and revelations for one day. Well, at least Jamie had. 

And so Jamie saw no problem in putting it off. In fact, he even enjoyed that thought.

For now, all that he needed was to sleep well. And all that he needed to sleep well was Brandon beside him.


	17. Tomorrow's rain will wash these tears away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One day Jamie wakes up to find Brandon gone. Going through all the range of humanly possible emotions, Jamie tries his best to make sense of the situation, and to adapt to the sudden absence of the man he thought he knew.

Could he really have not seen it coming? 

For the past three days, that persistent thought would return to Jamie time and again, like an unyielding refrain. It never let go of resounding in the back of his mind, no matter what Jamie had been trying to keep himself occupied with. 

When something like that happens, there must be the signs beforehand – if there are none, then it must be just that you have missed them, Jamie was sure of that. 

And he also knew exactly why it was that he had missed them. He had simply let down his guard and turned a blind eye on them. 

He didn’t know, because he didn’t want to know. Things were going too well for him and Brandon, and he was getting too cozy to be willing to give it up just like that, refusing to see the reality gnawing up upon them from behind. 

Ever since he had exposed himself before Brandon, honestly recounting the story of his failed past relationship, Jamie’s bond with Brandon gained a whole new level of intimacy. Brandon’s nonjudgmental acceptance of Jamie’s mistakes and the weaknesses that had led to them made Jamie feel calm and relaxed when by Brandon’s side like he hardly ever – if ever – had with another human being. While this may not have been a dreamy little connection of limitless understanding and of reading each other’s minds without saying a word, it did have an unexpected quality and to Jamie, it was more than good enough. At that certain point, with that certain inner state that Jamie was in, there was nothing else that Jamie needed.

It came so natural to them, being that way. Such was the power of their newly found affinity that Jamie had soon begun to forget if they had used to be any other way, his subconscious fervently wishing they could only stay like that forever. And, quite cleverly, he also wouldn’t ask himself if Brandon in fact shared that peaceful feeling of amazement. He had somehow assumed that if Brandon didn’t enjoy the way they were, he wouldn’t pretend it was otherwise. He would let Jamie know that something wasn’t right, or else, he would simply be gone.

And now Brandon was gone.

Just like that. 

Looking back in a frantic search for those signs that he had missed, Jamie remembered that after all he did realize that something was the matter. It had begun about a week before, when Jamie started to notice a slight shift in Brandon’s behavior. 

Bit by bit, Brandon would seem more withdrawn, somewhat apathetic. It was not a facile observation to make, Brandon’s usual self being so reticent and composed. How was Jamie supposed to tell if Brandon’s scarce replies and lack of initiative indicated a regular Brandon being quiet and not easily agitated, or if it was already a symptom of Brandon spacing out and slipping away? How could Jamie have correctly assessed if his own feelings of disharmony and rejection at Brandon’s apparent disinterest in whatever Jamie was saying or doing were but a sign of a hurting pride of his inner child demanding attention, or if in fact they pointed to Jamie and Brandon losing their connection? 

In other words, Jamie did realize that something was the matter, but he refused to acknowledge it, worried that again, as it had been the case with Jessie, it was nothing else but his own needy self that forbade him to appreciate the differences in how they were approaching their relations with other people, and Brandon’s very basic need to keep his distance and his own private mental space. And on a deeper level, Jamie was also worried about a yet another thing, one that scared him enough to prevent him from even thinking about it in a conscious, straightforward manner: that within the present formula of their relationship Brandon had been gradually burning out and was well on his way to let go. 

Days went by, and Jamie discovered some objective hints that could have confirmed his concerns, his personal impressions aside. As it seemed, Brandon displayed a major drop of energy. He slept much more. He would sleep in as Jamie was leaving for work in the morning, and upon his return Jamie would sometimes find him napping on the sofa. When he was awake, every so often Jamie would catch his blank gaze staring into nowhere, like while looking Brandon was too tired to actually be watching anything. 

And that made Jamie concerned, a premonition creeping up that Brandon’s apparent dissociation was in fact very real – and that it wasn’t about Jamie at all. A recollection visited Jamie’s mind, recollection of an unfortunate conversation he had given Brandon his word not to ever get back to. 

“I’ll read it, but next time you stay out of this.” That was exactly what Jamie heard Brandon say when he had handed him the materials on sex addiction diagnosis and recovery options. And Jamie conformed with the command, because he didn’t want to lose Brandon by making him terrified and angry. Deep inside Jamie did realize that ‘keeping’ Brandon by refraining from doing what was right for the sake of a fake peace was an actual opposite of ‘not losing’ Brandon – it was perhaps the straightest way to forsake him indeed. But Jamie refused to pay any closer attention to that voice of reason within himself. He freaked out. He was too overwhelmed by the depth, persistence and convolution of Brandon’s problem right at the very start when he had tried to address it. He was so scared of not doing it right, of further damaging Brandon and making Brandon hate him in the process, that he succeeded in making himself believe that if left alone to cope with his problem, Brandon would somehow manage.  
Which was a blatant contradiction to whatever Jamie, or any other person in their sane mind and possessing some amount of knowledge about the real world, had known to be true about the very nature of any addiction. Addiction would not brake by itself if left untreated, and neither could it be cured with the affected person denying the depth of the shit they had found themselves in. 

Still, Jamie decided to leave this thing alone and not even give it any deeper thought, while, very farsightedly indeed, allowing himself and Brandon to grow closer, breaking his own borders of distance and mistrust one by one.

And then, some three days before Brandon disappeared, Jamie had started to seriously reconsider what the true reasons behind Brandon’s detached state were.

He wasn’t there with Brandon on a twenty-four-seven basis, in the end. It would have been way too guileless to assume that Brandon really stuck around all day long just doing the chores, reading, playing with the hamsters, petting the cats, and going out only to get the groceries and papers. Brandon was an adult. And he preferred very adult-like pastimes. As much as Jamie disliked to imagine whatever Brandon may have been up to while Jamie was away for work, it did make sense to explain Brandon’s sudden drop in energy levels with a reestablishment – or perhaps advancement? It would be an another naïve belief to suppose they had actually ever stopped for a longer while – of his erratic sex patterns.

Increasingly anxious, Jamie approached Brandon about what he had observed. 

“You look tired”, he said as casually as he could. “Is everything alright? Have you been sleeping well?” 

Of course, it was not like Jamie counted on Brandon admitting ‘Yes, I do have a problem, can we talk about it?’. All he had been hoping to achieve was to let Brandon know that he knew that something was up. And maybe as Brandon would get used to the thought and appreciate that Jamie wasn’t blind, he would at least consider explaining to Jamie what it was all about.   
In that moment, however, all that Brandon seemed to be was surprised that such a topic should even come around.

“I’m fine”, he shrugged and added “Maybe I’ve been doing too much running lately”, a perfect spontaneous excuse. “And yes, I’ve been sleeping well”, he emphasized, perhaps subconsciously, contrary to his own obvious intentions letting Jamie know that his suspicions about Brandon’s sleep deprivation had actually been right on target. 

Resigned, Jamie smiled patiently and held Brandon’s hand. It was no use trying to get him to open up. He wouldn’t say anything anyway, and besides, if Jamie’s inquiry hadn’t made him cringe even ever so slightly, his face a perfect mask of stone, then apparently the matter wasn’t something as serious or urgent as Jamie had feared. “I know you’ve been going through a difficult time. I’ve just been thinking there could be something I could do to help you out”, he reminded as he confidently squeezed Brandon’s palm in his own.

“But really, I’m fine”, Brandon insisted. “You don’t have to help me”.

If that’s what you’re saying, Jamie thought, and so he let the thing alone. 

And now, only a few days later, Jamie really couldn’t believe himself. Had he really thought he wasn’t blind? That was pure vanity, to put it mildly. He had been looking without seeing. He had been seeing without acknowledging what it really was that he had seen. 

When Brandon was saying his ‘I’m really fine’, Jamie chose to believe it. He chose to believe whatever he found convenient enough to believe. Instead, he should have trusted his own intuition when it had told him that the connection was gone. Because Brandon’s ‘I’m fine, don’t help me’ lines were not meant as a way to talk to Jamie, but as a way of cutting him off and putting him aside. Brandon didn’t say that to make Jamie understand, or to communicate anything. He was saying those lines solely to be left alone. 

What a shame that Jamie had only learned all that in hindsight. 

That night Jamie was on at work. He worked in a 24/7 type of clinic, so while this did not happen very often, with the number of staff employed there it usually turned out that every fifteen days or so Jamie would take the job and receive the late night emergency calls from their patients, finishing at seven in the morning. So there he was, getting ready in the evening, every now and then throwing in a corny complaint about how the best part of night shifts was that eventually they had to end. 

Brandon wasn’t very responsive, and instead he was rather pensive – and there was nothing unusual about it. Brandon was all about that on most of his days. Jamie explained to him in detail what kind of stuff Brandon could find in the fridge to make use of it, even though he was quite sure Brandon wouldn’t even think about having a bite, much less going to such lengths as preparing some meal for himself if left alone (because he never did). 

He also told Brandon to call or text him should he ever get bored, and he assured Brandon he would reply or call him back as soon as he had some time to spare – Brandon’s messages would be something to keep Jamie going through the desolate dullness of the night at a workplace. 

And finally, Jamie casually told Brandon to sleep well and he wished him good night. If only he had known then, he would have given Brandon a hug and a goodnight kiss. He hadn’t even really thought of it, because he didn’t want to attack Brandon with his suffocating affection. 

If only he had known then. 

He didn’t hear from Brandon that night, not even once. After the shift, sleepy and exhausted, he sneaked into the apartment as quietly as possible lest the noise should wake Brandon up. He gave his cats a few welcome cuddles and ear scratches, trudged into the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, and then with an embarrassingly loud empty stomach burp he walked back to the kitchen to feed the cats and look for some human food, too. 

Upon opening the fridge, Jamie was amazed to find a huge bowl of a deliciously looking homemade salad inside. While himself happily getting by with canned foods and instant rubbish, Brandon could be surprisingly particular when it came to cooking for someone else. 

Jamie allowed himself to enjoy the feast which he owed to Brandon’s consideration, his equally hungry cats gobbling at their chicken wet food in their dining corner by the window. It was such a magical, peaceful moment of feeling and knowing that someone cared, even without having that person physically in front of you on that very moment. 

Nourished and satisfied, Jamie put his empty plate in the dishwasher and lazily strolled into the bedroom.

He was slightly disappointed to find the bed empty, but he wasn’t yet alarmed. Seeing the bed so neatly made, the blankets and pillows so spotlessly arranged and the sheets left without a single crease, Jamie even as much as unconsciously smirked at Brandon’s pedantic antics.   
Apparently Brandon had gone out for an early morning jogging session. It was almost eight o’clock; it made perfect sense. Especially with Jamie’s breakfast waiting for him in the fridge, which probably meant that Brandon had been up for some time now. And anyway, not that Jamie cared too much right now. His body was too relaxed to bother, his nerves and muscles too overpowered with the sudden need to reclaim the missing hours of sleep.

Sleep was good, after all. And so was having someone to come home to. 

When Jamie woke up, it was well past three in the afternoon. He had certainly had a good rest; he felt invigorated and refreshed like he had just had a nap and not been trying to recover from staying up all night. The sun was shining straight into their bedroom window. The world outside was covered in that enticing springtime sunlight, making every bit of the picture feel simply alive. Jamie opened the window to catch some of that sunshine and afternoon warmth into the room. It made him feel very much alive, too.

He yawned, and then he said hi to his hamsters, all three fast asleep at the time. Jamie refilled their tiny food bowls in case they should wake up hungry, and he decided he, too, should think now about getting some lunch for Brandon and himself. And so he tossed a t-shirt over his head and pulled up a tracksuit bottom, leisurely stretched his arms and left the bedroom.

Nothing had changed in the apartment since Jamie went to sleep a few hours earlier. All objects and items were exactly as they had been before, not moved by even an inch. And still no traces of Brandon.

‘Still’ probably wasn’t the best word, Jamie decided. There was nothing unusual about it. Nothing unusual about Brandon not being there when Jamie had gone to sleep, and nothing unusual about Brandon not being there when Jamie woke up. If earlier Brandon had been out for an early morning jogging session, then now he could have gone to the malls to get some groceries for lunch and dinner, or whatever he might have needed from the malls. Or literally whatever, really. Brandon was an adult, and he had his own things to do. In fact, it would have been a much more serious reason for concern if Brandon wasn’t going out anywhere during the daytime at all – no person should remain confined within the four walls of an apartment, day in, day out, with cats and hamsters as one’s sole companion (and did Jamie know everything about it). It may have felt somewhat strange, because Jamie so rarely would spend a whole day at home, so he had little idea about Brandon’s normal daily patterns – he simply wasn’t used to Brandon not being there without any bit of explanation. Also, Jamie had been so fast asleep that he could hardly remember his coming back home and laying himself down in bed. It was no wonder if he failed to notice if Brandon had repeatedly been going in and out of the apartment during the last few hours. Especially since Brandon had definitely been thoughtful enough to make sure he acted discreet so that he wouldn’t wake Jamie up. _There was nothing suspicious about the situation. Absolutely nothing._

Jamie decided to refrain from preparing lunch for a couple more minutes. If Brandon really was out shopping, then he must have had his own ideas about their next meal, so it was reasonable to wait for him. Anyway Jamie wasn’t that hungry yet, so he settled for an apple in the meantime, and he grabbed a professional veterinary journal, with the reading of which he was lagging behind by about a month or so.

He did a fairly good job at staying focused. He devoted about thirty minutes (yes, he was consistently checking on that with his wristwatch) to reading two papers with a so-so interest and comprehension of the material. He had managed to almost perfectly ignore the notion haunting his mind and soul that _something was terribly wrong_.

Having finished the second paper, Jamie closed the journal quite abruptly and put it away on the coffee table. He had felt an overwhelming urge to check out on the apartment’s entrance hall. As it turned out, Brandon’s jogging shoes were still there in the cabinet, right where they always used to be. A pair of Brandon’s shoes was missing, however, and so was his light spring jacket. Jamie winced, as if he really had needed such a revelation to confirm that Brandon really was out. 

Suddenly, as if remembering something, Jamie dashed back to the bedroom. The window had been opened ajar, but now Jamie almost tore it apart from the hinges to stick his head out with a weird sense of emergency.

A sweet late May breeze felt tender against Jamie’s bed-ruffled hair, and the mild beams of sunshine playfully caressed his cheeks. It was warm. Much too warm to be walking around in a jacket, and Brandon was very resistant to the cold, so if anything, he tended to dress too lightly rather than too thickly. What did he need that jacket for? It didn’t make sense!   
Jamie didn’t want it to make sense. 

In spite of himself, like in some kind of trance, Jamie frantically opened the bedroom closet, cabinets and drawers. Brandon’s things were still in there, intact: the clothes, the underwear, everything. It should have made Jamie relax, but it didn’t. Instead, he rushed into the bathroom and did basically the same – checking out on Brandon’s cosmetics and shaving kit to make sure they were still there. 

So it wasn’t like Brandon had left permanently. As in, moved out. At least, that was not his intention, right?

But what was an intention, anyway? How much was it worth, exactly? When Brandon had abandoned his own apartment two months earlier, he had absolutely nothing on him. He may not have intended that, either – to leave his own place for an indefinite period and stay with Jamie instead. It just turned out that way.

And now it was ‘just turning out’ that their time together was over.

He had been putting that off for as long as he possibly could. And now, the first moment Jamie had consciously thought that thought, he almost went crazy with the pain. 

Completely distraught over a course of a few seconds, Jamie strolled anxiously back and forth through the entrance hall, the living room and the kitchen annex, and back again. His mind was overloaded. There was so much going on in there that he could not possibly keep the record of all of it, all the senseless grief, anger, guilt and worry all mould into one, even if he tried.

He didn’t know how much it took him to regain a remotely decent degree of composure. Only after he had, however, did he consider a solution most trivial and obvious under the circumstances, which was to try to contact Brandon on the phone.

Funny that Jamie should have still been hesitant – and yet, when he reached out for his own cell, his wrist trembled, and he had to take a deep breath to analyze what it was that kept stopping him from that natural move.

Brandon didn’t like phone calls. Brandon didn’t like to be bothered.

If Brandon had wanted Jamie to know where he was and what he was up to, he would have let Jamie know by now. 

Overcoming what was essentially a massive fear of rejection, Jamie resolutely snatched the phone and dialed Brandon’s number.

All to the effect of facing an expected rejection, naturally. 

An instant sound of the answering machine made Jamie realize that Brandon’s phone had been switched off. There were about three explanations that Jamie could conceive of off the top of his head.

First, the fairy tale one: Brandon’s battery had accidentally been low on life when he left, and as he didn’t have the chance to charge the phone, it was now dead.

Second, the dramatic one: something horrible had happened to both Brandon _and_ the cell phone (for example, both could have been smashed by an underground train) – or, a less dramatic variant, _only_ to the cell phone (maybe somebody had stolen it, or sat on it, or thrown it into a pool, a puddle, or down a bridge) – so now it was obviously out of service.

Third, the simple one, also called, more fittingly, the plausible one: Brandon had switched the phone off, because he didn’t want Jamie to call him and to pester him with the ever so annoying questions about Brandon’s plans and whereabouts. 

Something about that last explanation, and how realistic it really sounded, made Jamie feel like crushing his own phone with bare hands right then and there. 

He didn’t. Instead, he threw it fiercely against the floor. He heard its loud thud resound and then slowly fade into a complete silence, like it had always been that way.

Like there had never been any sound, any color, any form to Jamie’s world. Like whatever illusion Jamie had had of his world being a welcoming place, real and alive, was precisely all that was there to it: an illusion.

Fixing his eyes upon a deadly quiet phone like some kind of curiosity, Jamie could feel the recollection of Jessie’s infamous line creep upon him from behind, slide up his spine until it breathed its poison right into Jamie’s ears. 

_It’s your world that’s fake and empty._

Afterwards, Jamie tried to call Brandon a few more times, all to the same result. He really meant for those desperate attempts to reach Brandon not to seem compulsive. In fact, he had it all figured and well-planned, following a roughly regular pattern of dialing the number every thirty to fifty minutes (the intervals were never longer than a whole hour, because for some reason it just wouldn’t seem right). Much more often, however, would he look through the window or listen closely for the footsteps in the hallway. It was all to no avail and in his heart of hearts Jamie knew it would be, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop it.

He was restless. He couldn’t bear to sit or stand in one place for any period longer than a few heartbeats. Walking around in mindless circles, he was almost grateful that Brandon hadn’t let him know where exactly he was going, because otherwise Jamie would certainly have gone looking for him, and what good would that do to him again? He was a masochist who loved to have rejection spat straight in his face; being rejected in a more discreet, behind-the-scenes manner simply wasn’t thrilling enough. How lucky Jamie was that fate – and the people around him in her service – was sometimes kind enough to make decisions on his behalf. 

Questions kept popping in Jamie’s head time and again, and he had a hard time even following them, much less giving his own makeshift answers to try and arrange them in a linear order that made any sense. Still, he gave it his best shot, and soon enough he had his answers, his little improvised theory about what was going on based on almost absolute null data and resources to draw on – all despite the fact that he did realize he was in no shape right now to conceive of anything that would as much as distantly resemble any sort of acceptable logic.

The most pressing unknown was at the same time apparently the easiest one to resolve. _Was Brandon planning this all along?_ And all the dangers of such an attitude notwithstanding, Jamie settled for the quickest answer, one born from his inner demons, those persistent evil genies whose bottles had been cracked open by Brandon’s disappearance in an instant, and whose power over Jamie was simply infinite. 

Of course he was.

He even was nice enough to give all the signs. The distancing. The withdrawal. The mental absence and overall numbness.

Jamie had it all laid on the table and still he failed to notice it, no, he refused to notice it, he refused to acknowledge the impending truth. What a stupid, self-indulgent, pathetic jerk he was. Well, he got what he deserved.

Rage at himself and all forms of self-hatred were sizzling under Jamie’s skin for a while, as he was battering himself for his alleged naivety and self-satisfaction. How could he even allow for things to go that far? How could all this be really happening? Did he really believe that a random guy with all sorts of problems and reluctant to give anything in return for Jamie’s so-called selfless help would stick around? Well yes, Jamie did. He did think that by being all so selfless, gentle and generous he was buying himself a guy, one maybe not so highly functioning and not very giving, but making this up with loyalty and thankfulness. Because _who wouldn’t be thankful for all that Jamie was doing for him_? _Anyone would_! There was no way Jamie could have fucked it up this time, because _he really was doing it all and for someone who needed it_ , right?! 

There was supposed to be no repeating of the same old mistakes, because Brandon wasn’t anything like Jessie. Jessie was self-sufficient and willful; Brandon was insecure and dependent. He needed a guardian angel by his side and there was no way he could even think of dismissing him. How could that go wrong? 

As the minutes, quarters, and then hours passed, Jamie’s anger slowly but steadily shifted from his own self to Brandon.

There were about a million voices inside Jamie’s head, each of them separately and all of them in a chorus telling him that he had been used. That he had let himself be used, like an ultimate sucker. 

A commitment without any sexual subtext, with Brandon being so crazy about sex and all that shit? What a joke. True, Jamie had been dumb in the extreme to have believed so sincerely in such a ridiculous notion – but Brandon, he was the obnoxious one, taking advantage of Jamie’s guileless need for closeness and commitment. 

Could Brandon have been really as cynical as it had occurred to Jamie right now? Because Jamie was beginning to suspect that perhaps Brandon had had it all figured out all along. Maybe all this was just the way Brandon worked it, and maybe this even wasn’t the first time. He would go out, find a prey vulnerable enough to fall for his helpless, damaged pretense – say, a troubled ignorant little fucker just like Jamie – then stay around for as long as he could, and once he couldn’t get whatever he found convenient anymore, or things had got too deep, he would simply get up and leave, disappearing without a trace whatsoever, only to look for another credulous ‘client’ to meet his immediate needs. Before, Jamie had only read about such stories in books or papers, and he was convinced that it was precisely where they belonged – in some kind of an outer world. They were definitely not something that could happen to Jamie, or at least that was what he had thought until that very day, when he had come to realize the size and extent of his own stupidity. 

An extremely uneasy sensation of heat around his solar spot overwhelmed Jamie as he remembered exactly why he hadn’t told anyone about Brandon staying with him all that time. He might have told Jessie that he had met someone and that he was staying over for a couple of days when he wanted to borrow Jessie’s clothes for Brandon during that time when Brandon had unexpectedly come along, exhausted and with nothing on him – yes, Jamie did tell Jessie quite explicitly that he had met someone, but that was when he was still hoping for a positive outcome such as a more or less conventional relationship, including the sex and any form of a common social life. When it had become clear, or rather Brandon had made it clear, that a ‘conventional relationship’ was the last thing he would take any interest in, Jamie knew better to keep quiet about what was going on. Next time he met Jessie, when Jessie excitedly inquired how it was going, Jamie turned the conversation down with a vague “Yeah, it didn’t really work” – which wasn’t an outward lie, as Jamie was a disastrous liar and Jessie had never had any problems seeing him through, and still it did a brilliant job in concealing and distorting the truth. Jessie knew better than to persist with the topic, always alert to how sensitive the issues of Jamie’s personal life were even years after the two of them had split. So yes, after all, it was a good thing that Jamie had chosen Jessie as the only person to be told anything at all about Brandon – because in spite of how perceptive and insightful Jessie was, he would always refrain from pushing Jamie too hard about his current love life, afraid to hurt him any more than he already had. In other words, Jessie was the safest bet, because he would let go of the subject matter the moment Jamie told him to do so – and it was all to Jamie’s advantage. 

Or so had Jamie thought until now. Now that Brandon was gone, Jamie wasn’t so sure if all that really had been so smart on his part. He had finally come to understand why his dearest ones would have deemed him insane and done everything in their power to put an end to his ‘relationship’ with Brandon. It had begun to dawn on him, essentially, that they may have been just… no, that they _would have been right_. 

Because now here Jamie was, all alone and left with all he had been asking for: nothing.

And he was probably lucky that he had got away with no physical or material harm inflicted upon him, at least as of yet. He wasn’t asking for anything less, after all, when he invited under his own roof a disturbed man who he had known completely nothing about. And not that he knew a lot more right now, either. Actually, all that he had thought to know for sure was currently in a process of a sophisticated falling apart, like a house of cards.

Because really, what did he truly know about Brandon?

Well, he knew where Brandon had lived previously. Or at least he knew the place that Brandon had showed him once and introduced as his past apartment. Jamie was not exactly capable of determining if Brandon had been telling him the truth about that one.

He knew Brandon had an equally neurotic sister who had almost committed suicide. That piece of information, however, ran an even higher risk of being fake than the apartment one – the existence of some kind of apartment which Brandon had an apparent free access to could be confirmed physically, the existence of his sister couldn’t.

He knew… he thought he had known Brandon’s cell phone number, but it might have been the case that the information was already outdated.

He knew his name was Brandon, because that what he had been told. Of course it was not like Jamie had seen any official documents or anything, and even if he had, they may as well have been forged – after all, what can you expect from people who walk into your life out of complete nowhere only to disappear just like that? And not that Jamie had had any guts to even ask Brandon about his family name, because, naturally, by doing that he would have intruded upon Brandon’s private space and scare him away. Those precautions that Jamie had been taking all so seriously were really deserving of a sitcom laughter spasm. (Having a random guy stay over at your place for over two months and not even ask him about his surname? Seriously? Like, really, seriously?)

All it seemed to come down to was that Jamie had lived for about ten weeks with a total stranger who now was gone. There might have been nothing real about what the two of them had shared. Nothing true. Just a peering black hole full of emptiness, which from afar looked oh so seductively, a long yearned for promise of togetherness and fulfillment. 

The state of confusion that Jamie had now found himself in was no less than utterly terrifying. And not only that: it was humiliating, too. Who on earth was the man Jamie thought he had fallen in love with? Was there anything true to that man that Jamie had opened himself to with his physicality, sexuality and emotions after the three desolate years of living a hermit-like existence? Was the object of Jamie’s sincere feelings nothing but a fake? Wasn’t there anything genuine about him, anything real? Didn’t that make Jamie’s feeling themselves fake, too? 

Was it all nothing but a game? Brandon’s suffering, isolation, self-doubt, and conversely his warmth, his peculiar protectiveness of Jamie, his quiet and sometimes awkward ways to show Jamie that he, too, after all, cared – were those all parts of a sophisticated make-believe the ultimate purpose of which was to make Jamie feel ashamed of his own oblivion and an ill-functioning reality check? 

Deep inside of Jamie’s soul, the one thing that shocked, angered and saddened him the most was to have his illusion of a life changing for the better shattered. The road he had just begun to follow, the long-forgotten pathway of moving on, now turned out a dead-end street, and Jamie had no idea how to go back. Under the circumstances, it seemed as if he would be sentenced to a lifetime stuck down that road, never to risk losing his way and facing so much hurt again. 

He had fallen in love with someone that never even existed. How typical. Jamie guessed now it was just meant to be like that. He wasn’t meant to live in a relationship. He didn’t belong with a caring, functioning person who simply loved him back. No matter how much Jamie tried to pretend and convince himself it wasn’t the case, he really must have been damaged on some basic level. Strong and independent people like Jessie didn’t need Jamie’s whining and self-pitying vulnerability around. And then people like Brandon, helpless and appreciative on the surface, didn’t really need Jamie as such – all they demanded was in fact Jamie’s readiness to be abused. 

Or maybe the blatant truth was that Jamie simply wasn’t capable of loving a living person. Maybe childish fantasies and picture-perfects from inside his head were all that he wished for – and all he could afford. All this time had passed, and _fake and empty_ still remained the unquestioned theme. 

The bitter sensation pounding in Jamie’s chest wouldn’t stop until late at night. The mad tail chase of his own thoughts had finally relented, but Jamie was too tired to fall sleep. With the silence inside his mind, the hurt within, that sore feeling inside one’s chest and throat, seemed all the more fierce. 

He took his cats with him to the bed. Of course they were no substitute for Brandon, but their body heat and the warm fuzziness of their fur were a remarkable consolation to Jamie. Most of all, they were tangible, and within his reach. They _were_ simply _there_. And that meant a whole lot.

He thought that crying might bring him relief, and he really wanted to express his internal breakdown with all the tears he could afford. But his facial muscles were stiff, and his throat seemed clotted. It was almost like he hurt too much to let his pain out.

Somewhere in the back of his mind Jamie started to consider some less dramatic options. What if Brandon was coming back? What would that mean? What if he casually walked in through that door, the next day or next week, as if he had done nothing wrong, expecting Jamie to take him in? 

What should Jamie do then? Should he even let him in? Was he strong enough not to?  
Would it even be safe to let him in? That depended on whatever Brandon had been up to while away from home, but would Jamie ever find out what exactly that was? Brandon wouldn’t be the one to tell him the truth, that one thing Jamie was sure of.

At the end of the day, Jamie felt like he was stranded at the bottom of a well, lost and too tired to move. If there was a way out, he couldn’t possibly imagine it. Even if he could, for all the fatigue he wouldn’t be able to uncover it.

And somewhere along the lines of such thoughts, Jamie had finally dozed off.

He woke up in the morning with a tense, anxious sensation of cramped muscles in his stomach, which reminded him of the circumstances much faster than his head could. His teeth were convulsively clenched, his throat all squeezed; he barely touched his breakfast, and he almost forced himself to gulp down the coffee, hoping it would help him regain any clarity of thinking. 

The feelings of rage and despair from the day before had somehow vanished, replaced by an increasing feeling of concern, now and then bordering with terror. 

What if something serious had happened to Brandon? What if somebody had hurt him, or if he had hurt himself? Pictures and scenarios flooded Jamie’s imagination uncontrollably. After all he knew, or at least had some idea of what Brandon’s inclinations were. 

The day before he might have accused Brandon of being a trickster who would make unsuspecting people take care of him by faking helplessness in the midst of some kind of lifetime turbulences. But now, with every passing minute increasing his intellectual distance to whatever was going on, Jamie had come to realize how unlikely that option was. 

Prompted by the yesterday’s emotion overflow, Jamie had been ready to assume that everything Brandon had ever said or done was a façade, a display of master level acting skills. Now he reclaimed his touch with reality at least to an extent that allowed him to approach the situation in terms of feasibility. What kind of evil genius Brandon would have to be if he really had faked all the torment related to his addiction and crises, never letting down his guard? How was that even possible?

It wasn’t Jamie trying to excuse Brandon for what he had done to him by disappearing like that. It wasn’t Jamie attempting to forgive him before he even knew exactly what there was to forgive. It was simply Jamie getting a reality check.

All the reasoning seemed to point to Brandon’s sex addiction finally getting the best of him and spinning out of control.

That very mood and attitude swing in itself – the sudden leap from indignation to worry – would have been enough to impose the feeling of vertigo upon Jamie. The actual content of the worry was like a burden of a suffocating weight. Certainly, Jamie’s imagination was going wild, and whatever it showed him, it was too real not to dread. 

Because there were only so many reasons why Brandon was not coming back regardless if he wanted to or not. His urges, which he probably had kept lidded for far too long, might have gotten him into serious troubles. He might have tried to hit on the wrong girl (or guy) and got beaten or otherwise harmed as a result, just like in all probability he had that night he and Jamie first met. He might have engaged in sadomasochistic – or simply dangerous – practices that were carried one step too far. Or he might have overdone something not directly related to sexuality, but still involved in all kinds of hard partying, something along the lines of drug overdose or alcohol poisoning. 

Whatever the reason, as a result just now Brandon could have been lying somewhere by the sidewalk in the middle of nowhere, half-alive, in pain, and with no one to take care of him.  
Jamie pursed his lips, short of breath, with a piercing aching in his chest. He had somehow managed to spill his coffee when trying to move an almost empty cup from the countertop to the kitchen table. He took quite a few seconds to consider if he really wanted to bother wiping that mess up. 

The hands on the clock proceeded inevitably. In a short time Jamie was supposed to begin another shift. He knew he had to move on with the normal pace of his life, even though the mere vision of putting his mind into anything else than Brandon was less then bearable.

With a heavy stride, Jamie walked out the door. He traveled the way from the apartment to his workplace on a total autopilot, hardly even noticing how he reached the station, got on the train, and then got off at the right place. He was deeply concerned if he really was capable of conducting his job that day – if he wasn’t more of a threat rather than help to his patients in that frame of mind. 

Nevertheless, he chose to have faith in his own professionalism – and, as it turned out, justly so. Far from having any problems concentrating on his patients and fulfilling his everyday duties, he found himself immersed in his focus on the work so completely that it alleviated all the previous tension inside him. At least temporarily. By the end of the shift Jamie almost wished it would last a little longer. His work currently seemed so much more attractive than his distressed personal reality, full of the unknown. Also, the work at least made some sense, and it was making a positive difference for someone. Having to return to an empty apartment really could not compete with that.

Jamie’s shift provided thus a much appreciated distraction. Upon finishing his work, he felt really burnt out, like he had overstrained himself while trying to fix his mind on anything that didn’t have to do with issues left by Brandon, left both literally and figuratively. 

Taking his route back home, Jamie was virtually lethargic. As minutes passed by, however, he found his heart rate steadily pumping up. His emotions, his instincts again reminded him of what was awaiting him back home much faster than his mind did.

The night before Jamie had been very much flustered about what to do in case Brandon did come back, and how to welcome him, if at all. Now it suddenly seemed like a memory of a different life, or like fragments of a different man’s story. Now all Jamie wanted was to get back home to find Brandon there safe and sound, no questions asked, no conditions put forward. 

And yet, the place that he came back to was dark and still, and dead silent. 

Jamie even tried calling out to Brandon, to make sure if he really wasn’t there, as if that was not obvious enough. Everything about the apartment remained exactly the same way as Jamie remembered it from the morning. Brandon’s shoes and jacket were still gone. The very idea that no more than two days earlier this house was all tender and warm with the presence of another human being appeared seriously unthinkable, right on the verge of absurd. 

An impulse struck Jamie out of the blue, urging him to act without hesitation. Or even without any prior calm-minded analysis of the situation. He wouldn’t even take of his own shoes. He entered the kitchen briefly to feed the cats, he also visited the bedroom to refill the hamsters’ food and water containers. And then he exited his apartment in a hurry, like he was chasing after something irreplaceably precious – or being chased after by something incomparably dangerous. 

The mansion where Brandon lived seemed exactly as quiet as Jamie’s apartment, even though it was supposedly full of other people who lived there. When Jamie arrived at the hallway that led to Brandon’s apartment door, everything was immersed in such thick emptiness that it sounded like the echo carrying the frantic rhythm of Jamie’s heartbeat.

First, Jamie tried knocking, which soon turned into a sort of desperate banging. The only result were those deaf loud thuds rewinding in Jamie’s head, every other one lonelier and more hopeless than the previous. Still, it was yet too soon to give up.

After some more futile attempts to attract any reaction from behind the apartment wall by ringing the doorbell, Jamie cleared his throat and shyly began his pleading.

“Brandon? Are you there?”

He rested his palms against the door and leant closely, pressing his ear to the surface. He listened attentively for any signs of activity, anything that would indicate a human presence on the other side. Not surprisingly, apart from his own short, irregular breathing, there was nothing in the air.

“Brandon, it’s me, Jamie.” 

What was he even saying that for? Unconsciously, he bit his lips as he always used to whenever anxious or confused. If Brandon really was there, he should have realized by now who the stalker at his door was. And if he had, and if he really had any intention of showing himself to Jamie, he would have done that by now, too.

And so, as Jamie had been led to by this rather bright reasoning, Brandon either wasn’t there or he didn’t want to see Jamie, to talk to Jamie, and to know whatever Jamie had to say. Maybe Jamie had come all that way only to learn something that truly was nothing new. 

“… If you don’t want to see me, that’s okay.” Jamie swallowed at that lie, because it really wasn’t okay; then, it wasn’t the most important point right now, either. What mattered was to get Brandon to cooperate, whatever means it should take. “You don’t have to explain anything if you don’t want to. I only want to know if you’re okay, that’s all. Please, Brandon. If you’re there… please, just let me know.”

He started out quite reasonably, and ended up as a beggar. The story of their relationship, wasn’t it? 

The lasting stillness behind the wall stubbornly revealed nothing. Jamie frankly couldn’t decide if there was someone out there or if he was talking to himself. And not that it even seemed to matter. The wall was so thick it might as well have been separating Jamie from another world; whoever could reside on its other side, he must have been a creature from a distant space and different time, the inapproachable one. 

A few more insecure heartbeats and Jamie was certain there was no use waiting anymore. He dug into his jacket pocket for a notebook, tore off a page and started to scribble. He did it spontaneously, without much consideration as to what he should write and which words should he use to express his intentions.

_Dear Brandon,  
all I wanted to tell you is that I’m really worried. We don’t have to talk, if that’s what bothers you. You don’t have to see me if for whatever reason you don’t want to. I’m not going to stalk you. But please, do let me know if you’re alright. You can just text me, or send me an e-mail, or really, anything, whichever you prefer.   
If I don’t hear from you by tomorrow, I’m going to have to report it to the police. _

_Take care. (Really, do take care.)  
Jamie _

He quickly brushed the lines with his eyes a few more times before he resolutely shoved the paper with the note into Brandon’s apartment through the crack under the front door.

If this didn’t work, nothing else would. Jamie repeated that line to himself time and again over the next couple of minutes, still clinging to that hallway as if he really believed that if Brandon actually was there, the note and a bunch of seconds to spare would be enough to make him change his mind about getting in touch with Jamie. 

Then in an instant, fatigue took over. Jamie had no more strength within left. He could barely stand straight. 

He finally grasped the fact – not just intellectually, but also physically – that Brandon wasn’t there. Even if he was there behind that wall, he simply _wasn’t there for him_.

For the rest of the day, Jamie was mentally blacked out. His mind was floating, he couldn’t stay focused on any of the countless thoughts that would come and go freely, sometimes depressing, sometimes outrageous, sometimes downright weird. 

Internally all dispersed, he was sitting on the sofa where they had made love for the first and apparently the only time. Now that memory did not seem like an experience of his own, or like something that had happened to his own body. It was more like an exciting, a little bit unnerving story that he had read in a book, at best – it lacked even the level of reality and tangibility to believe it could have been something Jamie had seen in a movie or any other visual show. 

Indeed, Brandon was a dream. He was Jamie’s own personal dream. A daring fulfillment of that most secret fantasy in which Jamie was someone needed and irreplaceable. A lucid vision of a bond beyond explicit words and conventional actions, that bond that Jamie had been craving so much it made his body ache. Jamie had come to believe in that dream. He was making himself comfortable in it, taking one day at a time, aptly chasing away the nagging doubts of ‘what happens next?’ and ‘what are we doing anyway?’. And now the anesthetic was wearing off, finding a reluctant Jamie in an empty room of a solitary world, right back where he had started. Precisely on the sofa where it had all begun.

As much as he yearned to linger to that fantasy world, the gates had already been closed, and the sentence of eviction put into effect. He did realize the inevitability of this all happening, in a way that made him subdued and defenseless. He only didn’t know how to accept that, how to go on just like that, so brutally torn off of his dream realm and thrown back into his well-established territory of isolation. But he did know that eventually he would have to – he would have to deal with it and go on, and that prospect perhaps was the most hurtful of them all. 

He hadn’t eaten anything at all since lunch at work, but for now, with his stomach squeezed like that, he couldn’t even bear the thought of swallowing anything solid. He was sipping a herbal tea, and even that didn’t come without some difficulties. He made a conscious choice not to have any coffee. He felt no need for pumping up his already high blood pressure, nor for chasing away the sleep, his only chance for consolation within the next few hours.

He was trying to numb himself by petting his cats away with rhythmic strokes. His mind clearly compartmentalized the experience: he sensed the softness of the fur, the warmth of the bodies underneath, the relaxed purrs radiating from the throats, but none of it combined into an integrated whole. Without Brandon, he couldn’t even feel close to his own cats anymore; and that really was a tragedy, ridiculous as it may have sounded. 

Totally stupefied with his sedative herbs, Jamie went to bed barely past ten. There was nothing else left to do, other than hoping herbs would turn out effective enough to put him to sleep immediately and let it last until morning. He had taken a few moments to let his poor neglected hamsters out and play with them on the bed, but expectedly, he couldn’t bear to witness that for too long. He paid with ailing for every second spent like that; everything about scurrying hamsters reminded him of Brandon and that Brandon was missing.

The hamsters clearly sensed that someone was amiss, too. They seemed rather drowsy and unwilling to have any fun, or perhaps simply disoriented at why there was only one human there with them when they had already got used to having around two instead of one. One of Jamie’s hamster trio, the high-strung Frollo (nicknamed ‘emo’), Brandon’s mutual favorite, was clearly upset by his bipedal master’s absence. Even pulled out of the cage he displayed no interest in having any blast time with his two brothers. He would roll up in the corner of the bed or on Jamie’s hand, and no amount of encouragement could make him try and explore the vast space of sheets and blankets. He kept starring back at Jamie with those honest, distressed eyes of black, as if to ask: What’s the point of any of this now?

And Jamie sincerely could not disagree, try as he might. Not now that he felt like an abandoned, confused hamster himself, and the one thing that he wanted the most was to curl up in the corner of the bed and shut himself out completely.

Having placed the hamsters back in their caged little home, Jamie opened the closet. An impulse provoked him to do so, even though by the rights of reason he knew how unwise and pretty much pointless that was of him. Yet, he couldn’t find it in himself to resist the urge. The mere enduring of the last two days had consumed too much of his strength to leave any room for fighting off such whims. 

Over a few seconds he made up that strange ritual which consequently he would follow strictly. First, he would take out a Brandon’s shirt on a hanger, then he would look at it from an arm’s distance, trying to remember all its details, and then he’d close his eyes and imagine Brandon wearing that shirt, alive, available and within Jamie’s reach. Afterwards Jamie would open his eyes, bury his face into the shirt looking for any traces of Brandon’s scent, inhale deeply, let the hot sensation flow through his lower abdomen and into his brain, and then he’d finally hang the shirt back where it had been before. 

He had repeated that routine with a number of shirts – five, maybe six, actually he had lost the count rather quickly – when he came across a shirt of his own. That unbelievably posh, expensive one that Brandon had given to him when they visited Brandon’s place to collect his stuff a few weeks before.

It felt odd to see it like that right now, right there among all that chic brand collection which belonged to Brandon. It was odd, because it seemed like a part of Brandon which Brandon had deliberately passed on to Jamie to stay with him. To share the parts of himself with others, to make them stay there forever… it just felt so out of place, so much not Brandon’s style at all.

The stylish checked pattern on the shirt seemed cold and familiar at the same time. It made Jamie feel like the shirt was looking back at him, daring him to try it on. To find out if it still fit him. To make sure if all that magic from the day when Brandon had given him the shirt really was completely gone.

Buttoning the shirt up, Jamie had that uneasy thought that without Brandon around, he would certainly find in the mirror nothing but an awkward creature, all dressed-up, attempting to be somebody he never really could. With a flash of striking accuracy, he suddenly remembered the moment he had been trying the shirt on for the first time – how flustered and anxious he was and how he couldn’t bring himself to look in the mirror until Brandon encouraged him to do so. 

Jamie closed his eyes, his fingers still shaky. Within an instant, the limitations on the time and space ceased to exist. He could swear Brandon was right beside him again, his hands placed upon Jamie’s shoulders firmly but gently. He could sense Brandon’s gaze tracing his frame with a gaze full of admiration and pride. The impression was so powerful it clogged Jamie’s lungs and made him struggle for breath.

He was afraid to open his eyes. He was being greedy. He didn’t want that fleeting moment of Brandon back in his life, Brandon there with him, to be gone just like that again. 

But the act of courage that opening his eyes was at the same time would be a proof of his faith in Brandon. And wasn’t it precisely a lack of faith that had brought both of them to that miserable point they were living right now?

Somebody had to have at least a little faith in the two of them. And as it couldn’t be Brandon, it all came down to Jamie. _He had to believe_. With or without Brandon. 

And so Jamie opened his eyes and looked straight ahead to meet his reflection in the mirror.  
He was surprised to see a handsome, confident, headstrong man, instead of the pathetic individual he had been so pessimistically expecting.

He was looking at the man he had always hoped to become, while never actually believing he could become one.

It was Brandon, and the way Brandon saw him, that brought him so much closer to that man in the mirror. 

How could he not have realized that by now?

As if he had finally pressed the correct replay button, that line by Brandon echoed inside his head. 

_I think you should keep this shirt, will you? So you can always remember how beautiful you are._

Brandon may not have been physically there anymore, and maybe he was never coming back. But what had happened between the two of them was not a lie, and not a dream. It was not all Jamie’s fantasy that had left no traces in the real world. It was real. And it wouldn’t be wiped out so easily.

Apart from the shirts, Brandon had left behind something much more precious, something immeasurable, something that Jamie had been yearning for most desperately in his life: his faith in Jamie. 

This shirt and that line were almost something like Brandon’s last will; maybe he had told Jamie those words exactly because he already knew what was about to happen sooner or later. Ominous and heartbreaking as it may have sounded, at the same time, in a strange way, it was a huge relief. 

It was Brandon’s legacy. He was basically telling Jamie to stay strong and move on. To disobey that would be to render Jamie’s love for Brandon completely in vain. 

Ultimately, Jamie felt deep in his heart that he should have been feeling blessed. He had loved, unexpectedly, and yet genuinely; and now he could make the best out of it. It wasn’t over. It was only a beginning. Right now it hurt like hell, yes. But sometimes it had to hurt before it got better. You can’t expect a wound to heal before you clean it. The most obvious truths would sometimes reach you at a very late notice; that was simply the way life was.

Tears were streaming down Jamie’s face as his whole body was shaking with sobs the magnitude of which almost ripped his chest apart. He was shaking and swaying, but with each second the invisible burden on his shoulders seemed lighter, and the air around him was certainly getting clearer. 

Now he knew he would get through it. He couldn’t ask for more.

The next day, the weather rapidly broke down. The rain was either drizzling or pouring all day through, and it also had turned significantly colder. It was nothing like late spring, it resembled much more of a premature, vengeful autumn.

Jamie woke up much more composed. A good cry apparently did relieve quite an amount of tension. He was sedated enough to arrange his priorities in a much more levelheaded manner, meaning first things first: he immersed himself completely in his work, devoting all his time and energy to his patients, their owners, and his team. He took great care not to think about Brandon until the last second of his shift.

Strolling down from the metro station to his apartment through the city streets moistened in those gloomy ash shades, with an opened umbrella in his hand, Jamie was pondering methodically what to do next. In case Brandon still hadn’t returned – and while it was the outcome Jamie had been sincerely hoping for, he was aware of how slight the chances were of having Brandon back home just like that after three days of being gone – he had to carry out his promise from the note he had left by Brandon’s door and report the matter to the police.

He wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the prospect. A gay man looking for help at a police department – yes, that certainly sounded anything but promising. If Jamie wanted to fill out a missing person report, he imagined he would have to share personal details about his relationship with Brandon: how they had met, how they had come to live together, and how much – or rather, what little – he knew about Brandon. The visions of how the male macho-biased officials may react to the report that a sexually promiscuous man had gone missing, written by the said man’s homosexual almost-but-not-quite partner, made Jamie cringe on the inside. Such a visit at a department would force Jamie to face his deepest fears of discrimination and derision straight on. He was also afraid that his report would not be taken seriously because ‘those fuckin’ perverts are simply getting what they deserve, no reason for us to bother’, or ‘your ass-fucker is probably just trying to enjoy a nice gang-bang, so let’s stop making such a fuss, tinkerbell’. (Oddly enough, on such moments Jamie felt a strong urge to call Jessie up. Jessie would know what to do. He never let anyone boss him around. When they had been together, obviously Jessie was the one who dealt with the outer world and overcame the obstacles thrown their way by an unwelcoming society. Jamie was comfortable hiding behind Jessie’s back and waiting for him to do his thing. Right now was the moment he missed that the most, exactly during the time when Jamie needed the most to prove to himself he was a big boy and he could handle himself.) Then again, it was no use refraining from doing something just out of fear of being treated unfairly or coming back with empty hands. It was the right thing to do, and that was what he was trying to focus his mind on. 

Regardless of how the police would respond to his request, there still remained the question of what else Jamie could do. The options were really limited. All he could think of was asking Brandon’s neighbors if they had seen him over the last few days, or otherwise observed anything going on around Brandon’s apartment. And then… then he probably should also call all the hospitals in their vicinity to check if there had lately been admitted any patient fitting Jamie’s description. And if there was still nothing in the hospital wards… well, that always left the coroners on the ‘to ask’ list.

Such thoughts should have given Jamie nothing less than a terrible headache and nausea waves, but for some reason he seemed to hold on quite well. Maybe it was just that he had already had his load of inner storm over the last two days, and the upper limits of emotional overload had thus been exceeded. Anyhow, he was genuinely task-oriented. He stayed concentrated on the things to do, and not on the things to feel. The latter would come and get him in their own time anyway, sooner or later. 

At home, he sat on the sofa with a peanut butter sandwich, cuddling both his cats on his lap, as if to make his recent emotional unavailability up to them. He was really a little hungry, too, which was quite a consolation given the latest circumstances. With all the humidity in the air, his hair was wired more than usual, and the dark brown curls dangling around his face attracted Pleakley’s attention as he curiously tried with his paw to make them swing.

While drinking his afternoon coffee (right now he really needed one to stay alert), Jamie checked the internet for the information regarding the procedures of filing a missing person report. Once he was done gathering the data, he decided there was no more time to waste. Time was precious, if going to the police was supposed to be of any actual help and not just a pretense to make Jamie feel like he had done all that he could. He had to act right now. Considering and pondering was not going to solve the case.

He got up and approached the balcony window. The downpour of rain wasn’t relenting, if it hadn’t even got thicker. Reality struck back. Jamie had woken up in a world completely different than the one he inhabited but a few days earlier, a world with no sun and no hope for the blue skies on the horizon.

As he was numbly tracing with his eyes the empty rain-painted alley, Jamie frowned as he stumbled upon a silhouette on the opposite side of the street. It was a clouded little figure crouching against a streetlight post, the only soul out there in sight.

The man definitely needed help. He might have been wounded, or deeply intoxicated. Or anyhow, probably something terrible had happened to him. He couldn’t be left out there alone just like that. … Jamie couldn’t leave him out there alone just like that. It was his first instinct: to help those whoever needed help. As simple as that.

He shivered at the powerful déjà vu. The memory, so far shrouded, of the very second they had first met and how Jamie ended up sticking together with him in first place, reemerged vividly inside Jamie’s soul. He remembered exactly how he couldn’t leave Brandon alone back then. He remembered how in that fractured, solitary man he recognized his own loneliness, the loneliness of scattered pieces pretending to be an integrated human being. He remembered it all.

In a rush like he was hanging onto dear life, Jamie grabbed the still soaking wet umbrella, and he dashed out of his apartment. He didn’t even need to see all that clearly the man from the alley to know exactly who he was.

After all, who else could spend hours out in the rain like that, believing he didn’t deserve to be saved, but waiting for the rescue patiently nonetheless?

Well, at least Jamie knew of two such guys. But since Jamie was one of them, this left him with just a single possibility.


	18. I'll take the rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Jamie dives straight into the pouring rain to pick up a lifeless Brandon, he realizes he does have all that it takes to take good care of both of them. And that he's actually fine with the rain, too.

With an opened umbrella in his hand, Jamie stormed out of the apartment building straight into the alley. His blood was racing hot, it seemed like it could set the rain on fire.

Brandon was cowering under the downpour, drenched to the skin. Clearly he must have been out there like that for quite some time now; it looked now like he was about to melt into a puddle himself. 

He looked… well, to put it bluntly and frankly, he looked like complete shit. His hair was plastered all over to his forehead and temples, his cheeks were covered with unkempt stubble. Again he had those huge, dented shades under his eyes, which expectedly revealed that he had hardly had any sleep during these last three days. His skin was as ash pale as the rainy sky above the two of them. From the distance Jamie couldn’t tell if this time it was just exhaustion or something worse. The only thing he knew for sure was that Brandon wasn’t alright.

Jamie stopped a few steps away from Brandon. He took a deep breath, lowered his gaze, and through the shouting of his heartbeat he reminded himself that he was beautiful, and that he had to stay such for Brandon.

Thus equipped in a new kind of strength, he boldly approached the crouching figure and spread the umbrella above him. 

After a moment of tense silence, laced with a stubborn hush of the incessant rain, Brandon shivered and only then did he look up. His eyes, circled in sleepless gray, suddenly opened wide to reveal an utter surprise. Getting back all this way right under the windows of Jamie’s apartment, he had stopped right there as if waiting for Jamie to come and help him make the final step back home – and yet he seemed not to have believed Jamie would ever make it there for him. 

He opened up his mouth, but remained wordless, as if at a loss of the things to say. Jamie stayed silent, too. His eyes traced Brandon’s figure all over, screening it automatically for any hints of physical injuries – thankfully, with no results. 

And then he stared into Brandon’s eyes. Those ashen, lifeless eyes, all they saw were the walls closing up on him. They were as lost and helpless as a five-year-old child’s, and yet as dim and tired as a senile man’s who had seen it all and was now only expecting from his life nothing more than a final moment to bid it farewell. 

Just what had Brandon really been through? And how did one get around to help him? Was that even possible?

Jamie didn’t have time to spare for such futile thoughts. The point was to try and give it his best. A moment or two to consider the results would only come later. 

He knelt by Brandon’s side and, with his left hand still holding the umbrella firmly, he reached out with his other arm, encouraging Brandon with a gesture to lean on him. He tried not to remember anymore that he was dealing with a human being, with all the convoluted issues that only human beings were capable of creating raging inside the said human being’s head. He imagined he had encountered a wounded stray dog and was just doing anything in his power – and to his best knowledge – to make it easier for the unlucky creature.

Brandon allowed Jamie to help him up, but Jamie could tell how he was trying to avoid any further physical contact with him. Jamie could guess the reasons fairly clearly – he remembered very well how ashamed and upset Brandon had been on the previous occasion when he came back to Jamie looking like that. 

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Brandon considered himself dirty. And untouchable. And despicable.

As if to confirm Jamie’s assumptions, through the vapor of the rainfall, a heavy cloud of sweat mixed with cigarettes and liquor hit Jamie’s nostrils; smelling like that, Brandon could easily blend in with the Central Park population. Nevertheless, at least he didn’t appear physically hurt: from what Jamie was able to figure out for now, he was standing rather straight, his limbs were movable, and he had no detectable cuts or bruises.

He did seem freezing, as Jamie recognized his body was shaking underneath the soaking wet clothes. Gently, careful not to frighten him, he wrapped his arm around Brandon’s shoulders, trying to pass on to him some of his own warmth. 

“You’re terribly cold, aren’t you?”, he remarked in what was the first line uttered out loud since they had met in the alley. 

Brandon remained stiff and unwelcoming. He didn’t push Jamie away, but he didn’t cling onto him, either. There was also no reply on his part. All of this, however, did not discourage Jamie. He felt that holding Brandon like that was the right thing to do, and unless Brandon explicitly opposed, he wasn’t going to step back.

“Are you alright?”, he asked another pointless question. He was aware of the futility of even asking that to an extent that it actually astonished him when he heard Brandon’s muffled voice echoing back to his ears.

“Yeah, I’m fine”, he nodded his head unconvincingly, so that combined with his miserable state it would almost be funny hadn’t Jamie been so exhausted and jaded with all the worry Brandon had consistently been causing him to go through.

So instead of smiling, Jamie nodded back attentively. Then he proceeded to remove his hand from around Brandon’s shoulder to take him by the arm. He did so gently, yet firmly, all the while trying his best to shelter them both from the rain with the umbrella. “It’s cold out here, let’s get back home”, he informed with a tone of a statement rather than a proposal. Gathering up all of his strength and courage of a man who knew what he was doing – a man you could entrust your life, health, and dignity with, the way Brandon was about to do – he gazed straight into Brandon’s eyes before he added: “You think you can walk all the way?”

All Brandon did was nod once again, passively, complacently, like his throat had been too cluttered to squeeze any other sound. He lowered his head and fixed his gaze upon the pavement, his defeated silence screaming all the guilt, shame, self-disgust, humiliation and confusion, all those things so powerful that they remained beyond the reach of any humanly accessible words – all those things that were way too much of everything to be expressed with a simple ‘I’m sorry’, ‘Would you please take me back?’, or ‘I really need you’.

It was killing Jamie to see Brandon like that. But somehow, in a way he had never known before, it was also fueling his need to stay strong for him.

This time not holding back anymore, Jamie pressed Brandon lightly against his chest, propping his rickety form with an arm. 

“Don’t worry”, he insisted straight into Brandon’s ear. His voice was calm, yet serious. He was making a point, after all, and he wanted it to be known and appreciated. “I don’t mind the rain.” 

His words were at least enough to make Brandon lift his stare up to Jamie’s attentive face – a dumbfounded stare of the one who had just realized that someone here had been too ignorant for that conversation, either for blurting nonsense or for not understanding it. ‘What the hell’, that was exactly what Brandon’s face was saying, even though he didn’t bother to put it into words – speaking was in general too much of a strain for Brandon, and especially on a day like that.

But Jamie was alright with it. Brandon might have grown deaf and blind on that self-imposed exile of his – and it still didn’t mean Jamie had to follow the same track, or that he even should have.

He layered Brandon’s lifeless gaze with that of his own, single-minded, shimmering and clear. For the first time during that encounter, he even afforded a smile.

“I don’t mind the rain”, he insisted once more, as if that really was supposed to explain anything. And then, in a sudden flash of madness, he placed the umbrella handle in Brandon’s hand, only to leave the umbrella’s safe cover for the rabid downpour of the rain. “See? See this?”, he gasped, the icy tickling of the raindrops making him laugh like a lunatic and short of breath at the same time. “It’s alright. The rain can do me no harm.”

Brandon stayed petrified for a few seconds. It wasn’t even clear if he understood what was going on and whatever Jamie was trying to say, and even if he did – if he gave a damn at all. But then, suddenly energized with a panic influx, displaying commitment like he never had for his own cause, within an instant he sprinted towards Jamie to shield him back with the umbrella.

“But you’re gonna get soaked”, he muttered hoarsely, not so matter-of-factly anymore. It was his tone rather than what he had said that revealed Jamie had finally managed to reach him anyhow. The air all around was swelling with tension as much as it did with the rain.

Jamie shook his head, the already damped curls clinging to his pale cheeks. His smile only became broader, as if the rain had washed away a whole great burden from his arms. “So what?”, he even dared to question teasingly, even though that lasted only for a short while, as he was quick to realize Brandon wasn’t about to share his suddenly flourishing mood. “It’s not like it’s going to kill me, you know? I’m stronger than you think.” He inhaled before he resumed his passionate monologue. “I may even be stronger than I gave myself credit for. Perhaps I can even be as strong as you are, Brandon.”

Contrasting with Jamie’s zest, Brandon remained skeptical and bitter. He blinked dubiously, and then he hung his head low. “I never thought you were weak”, he replied with a light self-defense overtone. 

Jamie acknowledged with a nod that Brandon’s words rang true to him. “But you thought I wasn’t strong enough for all this”, he corrected. “And then in fact who knows, maybe I’m not. But we won’t find out unless we try, will we?” As he rubbed his dampened forehead with equally wet fingers, Jamie continued softly and encouragingly. “I realize how difficult this must be for you, but if you think you can afford giving me just this one chance… then please do.”

It wasn’t facile for Jamie’s solid enthusiasm to get through to Brandon. Actually, all it seemed to do was make Brandon flinch and bury his head between the shoulders. If he had had any power residing in his look, he certainly would have pierced the pavement inside out.

“It’s not about being strong or anything”, he retorted. For a while Jamie waited for him to elaborate and explain, even if just a little. Even as he decided to wait, however, Jamie knew how unlikely it would be if Brandon revealed whatever was going on inside his head, those things that were tormenting him exactly the way the rain was tormenting his body. And indeed, Brandon was being Brandon, and so he kept it all to himself.

But Jamie didn’t mind. His newfound miraculously gained confidence seemed not the one to be shattered all that easily.

“I think that it is, at least to a degree”, he replied as he embraced Brandon compassionately, stroking his back with tender reassurance. Then he rubbed his moistened curls against Brandon’s coarse cheek, enjoying the rough sensation of Brandon’s stubble all over his temple. “You’ll tell me all about it when you’re ready, right?”, he remarked in the manner of an explanation rather than a question – because after all he wasn’t asking Brandon about anything: on the contrary, he was the one telling him that it was the way things would eventually work out. “And for now… let’s just go home.”

He dragged Brandon by his cold, sweaty hand, and pulled him into the direction of his apartment; this time he let Brandon carry the umbrella. 

He was smiling from within his eyes, as if he had never doubted that the place they were headed for really deserved the name of _home_ for both of them, for the two of them together. 

Brandon obviously wasn’t quite as sure of that, but there must have been a part of him that believed Jamie, or wanted to believe him, for that matter. After all, he did let Jamie lead him back home. And even more importantly, he was the one to first end up by himself right there by Jamie’s windows.

Precisely like he didn’t mind the rain, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You there. Yes, you. I know you're still around. I can tell by the kudos and pageview count rise. So, where are my comments? Or do you want to face a pack of raging hamsters?  
> ... But seriously, guys. I realize that most of you may not be the commenting type, but it bothers me not to get any feedback, especially now that the story's reaching its decisive phase. I would really love to know how you feel about these last chapters and the direction the story has taken. If I didn't want to know what you think, I wouldn't publish the story in first place.  
> I always appreciate honest and relevant comments, remember that. (And I love to talk about my works, too, perhaps a little too much.)


	19. Sometimes I'd wait forever to stand out in the rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Filled with new strength and optimism at Brandon's return, Jamie is bound to take a cold shower as it turns out that helping Brandon, communicating with Brandon, or even simply being with Brandon, has become even more difficult than ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've founded an ask blog for Brandon and Jamie (and also a general Prince of rain blog):  
> http://noshametoask.tumblr.com/
> 
> Stop by, say hi, see if you can make Brandon talk.

Silence layered with whispers of the rainfall accompanied the two of them on their way back to Jamie’s place. Brandon’s steps were heavy and cautious, almost limping; it might have been exhaustion and soreness, or it might have been some powerful emotions creeping underneath that indifferent demeanor, emotions such as fear.

Jamie remained quiet as well, as if breaking the silence would be disrespectful to whatever was going on inside Brandon’s inner world. Also, he was rather busy observing the tension letting go of his own body, replaced by an immense relief. Rationally, he did know that the matter was still extremely serious. There was hardly any telling what had happened to Brandon, what he had done, and what should happen to the two of them next. Emotionally, however, Jamie couldn’t help the feeling that the worst was over now. 

Brandon was there with him, they were back together again, and somehow that was all that mattered to Jamie at the moment. It was like nothing had really changed, a scene that he had seen so many times before – and he just _knew_ they would come through.

In fact, it really was a spitting _déjà vu_ of that day when an even more emaciated Brandon had suddenly appeared at Jamie’s door and ended up staying with him. Just like that day, Jamie had now Brandon rest on the couch while he ventured into the kitchen to prepare some hot tea. In the meantime, he had brought Brandon a bathrobe so that he would change and leave all his soaked clothes to dry.

“You should take a bath when you’re done. And then you have to eat something. It doesn’t matter if you’re not hungry, you can only last so long without food… and you haven’t had any in three days, am I correct?”, remarked Jamie as Brandon was slowly sipping his tea. He could tell from Brandon’s unenthusiastic face that he would probably have to feed him by force, more or less, but at least for now he decided not to dwell on the topic. 

Instead, he moved closer to Brandon and took a seat on the couch beside him. He wanted to direct the conversation (if there could be any ‘conversation’ at all with Brandon remaining mute like that) onto the subject he found most pressing right now. 

“Listen, I think I know what’s going on.”

Brandon peeked at Jamie with a sparkle of well-faked interest in his eyes, a sparkle which seemed to say, ‘oh yeah? I wonder what it could be, please enlighten me’. Jamie bit his lip nervously. 

He was definitely not surprised by that clueless manner which Brandon displayed. After all, it was a key element of Brandon’s repertoire of denial techniques, and Jamie could not expect anything else any time the topic of Brandon’s addiction came up. Still, ‘not surprised’ did not equal ‘comfortable’.

“You said you would take care of this yourself”, he reminded as he gathered up his courage to look Brandon in the eye. The difficult part was coming, it was almost there. He hated the thought that made him bring the thing up: he hated how he had to admit to his own failure, and he hated the premonition that, as always, Brandon would keep up his pretense like nothing bad was happening, and Jamie would in turn be too powerless to confront him about anything. “Somewhere inside I knew all along it wouldn’t work that way, though. I know you told me to stay away from it, I remember very well you did. But the thing is… I can’t. I can’t leave it alone.” Suddenly reassured with the sound of his own words, quite coherent and to the point, he declared confidently, almost powerfully: “It’s going to destroy you, Brandon”.

Brandon sighed and looked down. For a moment there, Jamie was hoping that he had managed to dismantle the intricate denial mechanism by simply showing a little poise. He was essentially right about that. He ignored, however, the fact that there was so much more to Brandon’s defense techniques than just denial. 

Where denial failed, there came the evasion. 

“I’m alright”, muttered Brandon, clearly wanting for that to be the final line of their current conversation. But Jamie decided not to let go. And he didn’t look away. 

“What are you thinking about right now, Brandon?” Jamie thought that if he gave Brandon a little liberty as to what to talk about, rather than rigid yes-no questions, it would produce more uplifting results. 

Up to this very point, Jamie remained rather bold. He was in it for a staggering disappointment when Brandon proved resistant to any and all attempts at bringing that talk home to him.

“I want to take a bath”, demanded Brandon, suddenly resolute, gasping with exasperation and shaking his head in a ‘leave me the fuck alone’ gesture. 

Jamie could feel the veins swell on his neck; he could no longer fool himself that ‘the worst was over’ or anything. The reality was calling him back. Brandon may have been back, but it was the same old Brandon, secretive, shunning Jamie and making him watch helplessly as he suffered. 

Jamie pondered for a while if he should push it or let it go. As a matter of fact, however, he realized that insisting on any explanations would get them nowhere. If Brandon was so set on remaining silent, no force in the world could get him to open up, but on the other hand, any force would drive him even further away. 

“Sure, I’ll go prepare the water for you.” With a makeshift naïve consolation that once relaxed and recovered Brandon would certainly become that much loquacious, Jamie added in a suddenly more energetic tone: “Do you think you could use some help, or would you rather do it on your own?”

Brandon consistently kept starring onto the floor. Jamie thought he had seen it all before, all that shame, all that solitude, all that restraint. And, as if he had forgotten where they were coming from this time and that things seemed a lot more serious than ever before, he was curiously sure it would all eventually work out _somehow_ , like it _always_ had.

After a long pause, still looking away from Jamie, Brandon responded: “I think it’ll be better if I do it myself”. Jamie bit his lips at the turn-down; still, with all the apparent hesitation on Brandon’s part, the rejection looked questionable to him. 

He gazed at Brandon attentively for a while, searching for tiny gestures and facial expressions that would help him figure out what really was going on inside Brandon’s head. “I will respect your decision, Brandon”, he began, carefully selecting his words. “I just want you to know that you don’t have to hide away from me. I realize that we’re dealing with something really serious here. I’m aware that you end up doing things you regret later. I know what the deal is. You can be sure you can’t shock me or upset me all that easily.” 

He claimed that in a calm, heartening manner. Still, Brandon only shook his head.

“It might take some time, you know. I’m dirty.” These strange vague words had nevertheless an odd quality of a steel knife piercing right through Jamie’s heart, to a degree it literally had left Jamie breathless for a second. Somehow, Jamie seemed to know exactly what Brandon meant by that. 

“You’re not dirty, not any more than me.” Carried away by a sudden surge of emotions, he leant towards Brandon and rested his palm upon Brandon’s. It was damp – and it was hard to tell if the reason was still the rain or rather the sweat running down Brandon’s hands – cold and coarse with, indeed, dirt. An instant feeling of compassion squeezed Jamie’s soul so that it almost ached. “We are a lot like each other, you see? You should never be ashamed in front of me.”

It didn’t take a genius to understand that neither Jamie’s emotions nor his touch could reach Brandon at that moment. Like the bathrobe he was wearing was sound-proof, Brandon’s expression wouldn’t change for even a second at Jamie’s fierce confession. When Jamie was finished, Brandon only sighed as if in irritation at an annoying noise in the background.

“I am dirty”, he emphasized with a conversation-finishing strength in his voice. Then he insisted: “I just want to go and take that bath.”

Jamie’s confidence was slowly fading away. Brandon had him constantly second-guessing, and yet the outcome never seemed quite correct. Did Brandon want Jamie to be there after all, or did he really want to go alone? And if it was the latter, should Jamie even let him do that?

But just as Jamie’s uncertainty as to what to do with Brandon was increasing, suddenly prompted by an impulse, he casually proposed a solution he himself couldn’t really put his finger on: however it had occurred to him and whatever he intended to actually do with it.

“Maybe we could take a bath together?” Feeling his cheeks burn with embarrassment the very instant he heard his voice say those words, Jamie made a rushed attempt to justify the outrageous by adding an even more awkward: “I mean, that would make you see that after all we’re not really that different… right?”

Just one look at Brandon’s startled face, that typical expression of a frightened cornered animal, had left no room for doubt as to just how downright bad that proposal was. Ashamed at how it all apparently turned out to be a smart attempt at him taking advantage of Brandon in his miserable condition, Jamie was stunned – and silenced for a few seconds.

Those few seconds were still long enough for Brandon to shake off that genuinely afraid expression and replace it with his classic stone-numb mask. 

“Alright”, he said, shrugging his shoulders. 

Perhaps it wasn’t as a big deal as it seemed, but nevertheless Jamie was left feeling like some kind of rapist, and that was an ugly feeling throughout.

He was completely confused right now. He had no clue what to do with or about Brandon. It seemed like everything he said and did had been of zero help – that, or it had made matters even worse. 

Perhaps Brandon would be better off without him, after all?

Fighting off the acrid sensation of tears swelling up his throat, Jamie tried to withdraw that ridiculous suggestion. This time he was the one who couldn’t bear to look Brandon straight in the eyes. “It’s not like I’m telling you to do this or anything, you realize that, don’t you? If you don’t like something… anything… you can just say so. It’s okay.”

He was trying to convince Brandon of that, but actually he himself already knew it wasn’t okay. When he collected all the bravery it took to look up, he saw Brandon vacantly starring into nowhere. Whatever the true reason, the one thing Jamie knew for certain was that he wasn’t welcome there. Not in that cold, lonely little world of Brandon’s. 

He couldn’t imagine just how wrong he had been. How blind he had been to the writing on the wall. 

Even though his body was right there, Brandon simply hadn’t come back.


	20. Dream about the sun, you prince of rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When a silent and depressed Brandon undressess and enters the bath, Jamie discovers the reason why he came back from his spree so damaged and shaken. Jamie is shocked and at a loss at what to do, but Brandon's unexpected confession of how he feels towards Jamie turns the scene around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's the last chapter, folks! Brace yourself for the emotion overflow.  
> Chapter warnings: mentioning of a rough group sex act possibly of dubious consent; a vague implication of childhood sex abuse.

“I won’t hurt you. I only want you to remember you’re not alone. And I want you to remember who you are.”

One step away from the bathroom Jamie stopped and tried to say that with the most tenderness and patience he could afford, placing a gentle touch of his palm upon Brandon’s elbow. Nevertheless, the moment he said it, he had already known that the attempt to reach Brandon would turn out to be futile again. 

Brandon simply didn’t want Jamie to see him, and he didn’t want Jamie to know. Essentially, perhaps he didn’t want Jamie there at all. Perhaps it would have been best to simply leave him be, but that _best_ wouldn’t feel _right_ to Jamie. He hadn’t been made for leaving alone people who needed help. Or rather, he hadn’t been programmed for it.

He watched Brandon walk into the bathroom reluctantly. They both grew uneasy, each for their own reasons unclear or not readily understandable to one another. The tension felt strangling and overbearing. 

As he was drawing Brandon a bath, in the corner of his eye Jamie noticed how shaky Brandon was when untying his bathrobe belt. It was unbelievable how disconcerted Brandon was right now about undressing in front of Jamie, that Brandon who would always so boldly present his birthday suit and walk around naked in the morning, disregarding of how he was getting Jamie close to a heart attack in the process. Brandon had so much of that organic poise on a daily basis. He appeared so comfortable and confident in his own skin, with his own body. But not anymore. At least, not on that day.

His trembling hands, so wary of taking the bathrobe off, said a lot about how afraid Brandon was about showing _the real himself_ to Jamie just now, _the ugly one_. Amazingly, Brandon seemed capable of telling the difference between the man from days or weeks before who never minded his own nudity, and the one he was today. 

Increasingly concerned, Jamie eventually approached Brandon and, shaking his head, he held Brandon’s hand down to stop him undressing. 

“Maybe you could…” He paused and he bit his lips, unsure if he really wanted to continue. Did he really mean to get back to that topic? He presumed they had already given it up, so why was he even trying to bring it up again? And yet, his guts told him to carry on. There was something about that prospect of having that bath with Brandon that made Jamie try again. And something inside Jamie was really stubborn about making something intimate and worthwhile out of this dreadful, solitary situation they were both going through right now. “You could undress me first, if you’d like.”

Brandon glanced at Jamie, and within that single glimpse he made Jamie painfully aware of the ominous communication gap between them. Here Jamie was talking his fantasies disguised as a display of protection and care; there Brandon was fighting for each breath and struggling to survive. 

It was just so out of tune for Jamie to mention that idea of them taking that bath together, so maladjusted to the circumstances and so absurd that he really couldn’t think of any way he could embarrass himself more.

The worst part, however, was probably that Jamie’s embarrassment wasn’t the core problem here. That was saved for Brandon’s grim state and for how Jamie had no clue what was going on. Because Jamie’s words made Brandon give Jamie that gaze which was certainly not like Brandon’s at all: sorrowful and forlorn, like he was about to burst out crying. It crushed Jamie’s heart to see Brandon like that, and to feel somewhere on the inside that he was to blame – or that at the very least he wasn’t of any help. 

Brandon made Jamie think of a battered animal who kept hiding in the corner, unable to trust for a human to help him now that it were precisely the humans who had done all that to him. It seemed so much better to stay out of everyone’s sight and bleed to death than to let anyone close and risk going through the hell all over again. And it’s not like Jamie couldn’t understand that point. Actually, he knew perfectly well how it worked. He knew how tempting it was not to trust anyone again and thus to fool yourself into having any control over whatever was happening to you. 

Nevertheless, when it was the case of a hurting animal, no matter how maltreated and agonized with terror, Jamie was usually confident about what he should do. He simply knew he wasn’t the one that had done wrong to the poor creature, and he strongly believed in his own ability to bring relief and alleviate the pain. But with Brandon, it just wasn’t how it worked. When Brandon was cowering there, feeling ugly and impure, insisting on him revealing himself to Jamie, on opening up both physically and mentally, made Jamie feel like a rapist again.

Like he was the one who had done it all to him. Like he was guilty of whatever Brandon had to endure right now.

“If only I knew what’s going on… If only I knew how to help you”, whispered Jamie, his voice brimming with remorse and self-doubt, as Brandon finally overcame his objection and took the bathrobe off.

Jamie helped Brandon get the bathrobe off his back. Holding the garment in his hands, Jamie pointed with his eyes to the bath, urging Brandon to get in and warm himself up. Brandon, however, wasn’t so quick to do this – and Jamie was soon to understand why.

Within the first flash of thought, Jamie was certain that the reason for Brandon’s lifeless immobility was overall exhaustion. He remembered how the previous time they had done that, Brandon could barely walk and he had troubles getting into the bath by himself. It appeared like now they were simply going through a replay.

And then Jamie noticed the bruises. There were a couple of them, on both sides of the ribs and over the small of the back. 

Initially, even that wasn’t enough to alarm Jamie. He still had that vivid image of Brandon all beaten up when they first met. Apparently, getting all cocky and messing up with the wrong people was just a part of Brandon’s acting out routine. 

But then, with a closer look at Brandon’s back, Jamie’s heart rate drastically sped up. Among the bruises there were also the abrasions, reddish with damaged flesh, leading down to the buttocks. The abrasions were twisted together with scratches on the buttocks and inner thighs, scratches which looked like a quite obvious outcome of the skin grabbed too tight with nails dug too deep. The skin around the buttock cleft was chafed and tinted with what might have been blood clots. It appeared sore and painful. 

So, Brandon’s swaying and limping hadn’t been caused by exhaustion alone. It was all crystal clear now. Jamie wobbled and leant against the bathroom door, his heart throbbing so hard like someone was trying to rip it off of his chest. 

He couldn’t catch his breath, and his hands were shaking – all that even before he could grasp completely with his mind what had really happened to Brandon. The revelation was too heavy on him.

He should have trusted his instincts when they told him he was being a rapist. He should have taken that second or two to inspect Brandon’s behavior carefully, instead of forcefully moving ahead like he was blindfolded. And now it turned out that just when Brandon needed Jamie’s sensitivity the most, it had failed him. Rather than doing anything to aid Brandon, he ended up damaging him even more. 

It was all too much for Jamie. All too unthinkable, all too hopeless. How did you cope with a sexual assault, how did you get around to helping the victim? How could you as much as approach that when the victim was someone you loved? 

How did you even get started with helping that person when you yourself felt so small and helpless, so overpowered with your own remorse, confusion, regret, fear, rage and anguish, all packed up into that single human body of yours? 

_Stop thinking about yourself_ , a heartfelt voice pleaded inside Jamie’s mind. _It’s not about you. You can go on crying, screaming, throwing fits of horror and self-pity, whatever you please – later. But right now, you have to put him first. Remember, you’re the lucky one. You can always count on yourself. You can always help yourself. And he can’t._

_You are all that he’s got._

Still slightly quivering, Jamie swallowed and let out some air through his mouth. The muscles of his chest were so tense like they were about to implode, and Jamie was in fact surprised to find that he could still produce any voice with his lungs and vocal chords squeezed like that.

“Brandon, look at me, please”, he asked in as firm a tone as he could, trying hard not to show how terrified he was about what he had just seen.

He could see Brandon’s chest move upwards as he inhaled deeply and cautiously. As he turned around, however, surprisingly he appeared quite composed now, as if he assumed that now that Jamie had found out what the matter was, nothing worse than that could happen to him anymore.

Brandon’s naked form was so fragile and defenseless. Jamie could easily imagine how anyone could hurt him, how just about anyone could abuse his body and take advantage of it. Brandon wasn’t the one to scream respect and appreciation for himself, that much Jamie had already learnt. But now he had found out about further limits of Brandon’s self-disrespect, or rather the lack of them. 

Brandon’s addiction was one pushing him further and further into a maze of reckless excitement. The truth was they both had known all along that some day it might turn out the way it had – that in his quest for thrill Brandon would put himself in one hazardous place after another until it ended up in a tragedy. Also, they both had refused to acknowledge that imminent outlook. Jamie was too scared, and Brandon apparently was too attached to that part of himself that made him do this to be able to say no to it. 

And now Brandon was staring back at Jamie with that typical dull gaze and expressionless face, like he had managed to throttle any emotions that Jamie’s words and actions had evoked in him so far. His blank, tired face seemed to say: _So what? What’s the big deal? I don’t deserve any better anyway._

Jamie could see right through him, like he was gazing into pure, colorless air. That nothingness was enough to feel each and every bone inside his body crack and collapse. It was genuine physical pain.

“If only…” he started out, the mere words and the tone both screaming regret, the only emotion he was capable of showing to Brandon right now. “I really wish I knew how to do that… how to never let anyone hurt you like that again”, he sputtered, unable to control the tears filling up his eyes behind the thick curtain of his eyelashes.

Peaceful in an unexpected role reversal, Brandon shook his head and casually entered the water, without even a grimace to show how uncomfortable he was when moving and walking. “Nobody hurt me, not the way you think they did. That was just what I wanted.” 

Jamie closed his eyes. He could feel a single tear roll down his cheek. He didn’t bother to wipe it, too busy clenching his fists in fretfulness.

“But your body didn’t want that”, he insisted weakly as his arms let out a shiver.

It seemed like the case was exactly the way Jamie had perceived it: Brandon certainly thought he deserved being mistreated like that. Jamie had a hard time facing this kind of philosophy. It was still a terrible thing to imagine if Brandon really demanded and, in his own twisted way, enjoyed that kind of rough, objectifying sex. On the other hand, Jamie had to admit to a certain feeling of relief if what Brandon was saying was true, if he really had given his consent to an abusive act. 

On the rational level, Jamie wasn’t so sure if it actually should be of any consolation. Did being unable or unwilling to say no on the part of the victim make a violent act any less damaging and cruel? But nevertheless, on the emotional level there seemed to be a significant gap between a brutal deed conducted upon the victim’s permission and the same deed without one. And as for Jamie, right now he needed anything that would comfort him under these increasingly dire circumstances, anything at all.

With Brandon’s silence echoing in the background, interrupted only by virtually inaudible tiny splashes of the water moved by Brandon’s hands and legs, Jamie approached the bath and knelt by Brandon’s head side. 

Resting his elbow against the tub corner, his voice still cracking from withholding the tears, Jamie inquired softly: “Does that hurt a lot?”.

Brandon shook his head again. “No, it doesn’t.” And indeed, he did give that impression, like he had numbed himself to any sensation altogether. Hot water could have irritated some of his sores, and the bath walls may have been pressing against some of his bruises, but there wasn’t a single wince to be seen upon his face, nor a single hiss to be heard from behind his clenched teeth. He was a true expert at hiding his own pain.

A pain so immense it almost broke Jamie’s heart.

“That’s amazing, you know?” Jamie did his best to smile as he wiped the corners of his eyes, fighting the tears that would persistently force their way from beneath his eyelids. “That’s amazing, because it does hurt me. Also, I’m scared. I’m not sure why, but still, I am. You see, it’s just like… like I am feeling all those things for you, all these things that you don’t let yourself feel right now.” He almost broke off in the middle of the sentence. Hardly had he blurted the final words before he finally buried his head in his arms and burst out sobbing uncontrollably.

He tried saying that to help Brandon reconnect with his own feelings, to make him realize he was safe now and whatever he was going through on the inside, he had a right to it. While apparently his words had no substantial impact on Brandon, they did backlash on Jamie himself. They made him experience with sharp accuracy what he himself would be going through if something like that had happened to him, and forced him to face his own powerlessness yet again. 

From behind the heavy wall of his weeping Jamie could hear Brandon swallow uneasily. This didn’t exactly help Jamie pull himself together, not when he thought of how his outburst must have affected Brandon. It was as if Jamie was throwing accusations against him, a ‘how dare you make me feel so horrible’ kind of accusations, a self-indulgent way of stealing all the attention, projecting the victim’s emotions upon the one who was supposed to take care of him.

Then Jamie felt Brandon’s fingers run through his hair, still slightly wet from the rain, in a soothing stroke. “It’s alright. Everything’s alright, you know?” There was a deeply reassuring quality about Brandon’s composed voice. Although more than a little embarrassed at being comforted by the one who needed comfort here the most, Jamie found himself somehow really believing Brandon’s straightforward tone. And this dried his tears, pretty much literally.

After all, if Brandon was saying such words with such quiet confidence, he must have had a good reason for it, right? 

Lifting his tear-reddened eyes upon Brandon, Jamie held Brandon by the wrist, and moved his head so that he could cuddle his damp cheek against Brandon’s palm. “Somebody hurt you and I can’t even help you. Are you sure you can call this alright?”, he asked hesitantly, but in his heart of hearts he was expecting Brandon to say yes. 

And Brandon went along with Jamie’s hopes.

“They didn’t hurt me”, he insisted, and he splashed some water around with what may have even looked as a tint of playfulness. It solaced Jamie to see Brandon recover like that, even though for a moment he had found himself frozen with another wave of terror as Brandon’s words confirmed there had been more than just one perpetrator. “You know, it’s really alright”, he repeated consistently, and something about his timbre told Jamie to listen more attentively: the way Brandon sounded it seemed like he wanted to make a point right now. As it turned out, the pitch detector in Jamie’s ears hadn’t fooled him. “When they were doing this… I was thinking about you.”

Now, that was… unforseen. Jamie blinked with uncertainty, dumbfounded for a moment or two. Was it hallucination? Was he imagining things? Or had Brandon really just said that? And if so, did he really mean what he had said? Did he mean what Jamie had heard? Was he aware of the way his words had sounded? Because in all his promiscuity, Brandon would often seem oblivious to the messages and innuendos he sent Jamie’s way. How often had it been so that words with quite an unambiguous ring to them turned out completely innocent in Brandon’s mouth? Yes, that was definitely the case here, too, thought Jamie with all his might, taking deep breaths and clinging to his dear sanity within this rapidly changing landscape. It can’t have been what it sounded. It can’t have been what Jamie secretly wanted it to sound.

“Did it help?”, he asked breathlessly, still under such strong impression of Brandon’s words that for some time he forgot to exhale. He deliberately replied in a possibly neutral manner that would not refer in any way to the assumed nature of Brandon’s ‘thinking about Jamie’, and consequently spare Brandon the awkwardness and Jamie the ridicule. 

“Yes, it did”, answered Brandon just as vaguely, nodding agreeably and thus putting a smile on Jamie’s face. Seeing Brandon relaxed like that encouraged Jamie to tentatively put a hand into the tub, dipping it at the side opposite to where Brandon was lying. Brandon appeared okay with Jamie’s presence at a range this close; and just when Jamie was sure that the subject of ‘thinking about Jamie’ had been ultimately shut down, his proficiency in Brandonese proved insufficient yet again. “Yours is bigger than any of them, so well…” He broke off and showed a lovely half-smile, clearly happy about his own levity.

As for Jamie, this time he couldn’t shake his astonishment off so easily.

So after all Brandon did mean what he had said.

The bewilderment was followed by a bashful phase which had Jamie momentarily flushing with a virgin’s blush as he grew aware of what exactly Brandon was referring to. To have his pivotal size praised was not something Jamie was accustomed to, and now Brandon of all people had just gone and said it.

The shock and suddenness of it all made Jamie dizzy, and he could hardly carry himself straight, even though he was already kneeling. Once again in a very short time his heart rate soared dangerously close to the maximum – his heart must have been made of quite some tough stuff if it had really survived all the recent drama. It took him a few moments to recognize he had just heard absolutely the best thing he could hear under these circumstances. Those could have been the words he had been longing to hear for the longest time. 

That could have been Brandon telling him there was a chance for them.

All the anxiety, distress and confusion of that afternoon and the past three days had tempestuously shifted into a state of elation. It caused Jamie to burst into laughter of pure joy, ease and wonder. It lasted quite a moment before he could compose himself. Brandon observed all that calmly, with an unfading smile; Jamie could tell that Brandon would gladly join him in the laughing fit, if only he remembered how to laugh at all.

“Are you serious?”, Jamie exclaimed finally, panting heavily, his cheeks still rosy with all the fluster. Sensitive to Brandon’s responses, he shyly reached out with his hand in the water towards Brandon. He was particular about not touching Brandon first.

Brandon, however, accepted the invitation, reaching out to gently touch Jamie’s fingertips with his. “Yes I am”, he nodded to that typically loquacious line. His smile was much bolder now, and for the first time that day he wasn’t wary of looking Jamie in the eye. “Aren’t you mad at me?”

Jamie moved his hand an inch forward to tenderly stroke the back of Brandon’s hand with his fingers. “What do you mean, am I mad at you”, he murmured, feeling his cheeks catch fire again at the recollection of Brandon’s insane fantasy – and he really did his best not to dwell on that image and not to picture himself inside Brandon at any rate. “If anything, I regret you never gave me the chance to actually try it.” He bit his lower lip in his regular nervous manner before he explained sincerely: “You know how I feel about you, don’t you. You should know then that I’m really glad if I could be with you during such a time, even if only mentally and not physically”.

Still, Brandon had his concerns, and Jamie’s reassurance did not disperse them.

“Because I think I would be mad… if a guy like that was thinking about me in such a way”, he sighed heavily as he muttered the words.

Jamie crooked his head. “And why is that?”, he asked quite coyly, even though he had barely contained a shudder, because he realized what Brandon was driving at. _I’m a disgusting pervert, you should feel insulted if I have fantasies about you_ , that was the actual unspoken message. “Wouldn’t you be glad if the thought of you helped someone get through a nightmare?” Not holding back anymore, and pretty confident their connection had returned, he squeezed Brandon’s hand lovingly. He could feel the current of his feelings for Brandon overflow inside of him again, giving him a new power to look after Brandon and withstand it all. “I would take better care of you than they did. I may not be the greatest lover out there, but I love and respect your body, it amazes me, and I would never do anything to humiliate it”, he confessed fiercely, the fire inside his chest extending right to his deep blue eyes. “And maybe, just maybe I could find a way to teach you how to love and respect it, too.”

He sincerely believed in every word he said, and that gave him courage to utter them out loud in the first place. And not even the predictable lack of a direct response on Brandon’s part would dishearten him. 

“It’s just like… like I was dragging you into something disgusting without your consent.” Brandon looked away, and his voice gained a dispirited, remorseful quality. Jamie almost couldn’t believe how ashamed Brandon was of something that on the other hand made Jamie feel he could fly. _Almost_ – it was still Brandon, after all, and his superpowers of turning everything worthwhile and moving into worthless and disgraceful inside his head.

Therefore, all Jamie did was patiently shake his head. “It wasn’t disgusting. And at least _now_ you know it wouldn’t be without my consent, alright?” He sighed, doubtful if Brandon really would see what he meant. On such moments, talking about Brandon’s addiction or about their relationship, Jamie would often get the impression they had come from different worlds and spoke different dialects, sometimes mutually unintelligible. 

But before the suspense could reach new heights, Jamie smashed the mood with a sudden loud “Achoo!”. Startled, Jamie was more than surprised to find goose-bumps on his forearms. If anything, he had been feeling too hot with all the emotion, coupled with the room-full of the bath steam; apparently, this subjective perception of warmth had desensitized him to the cold of staying in wet clothes, with incessantly damp hair, for over an hour now.

He heard the water splash abruptly. When he looked back at the bath, he saw Brandon with an encouraging look on his face, pulling his legs up to his chest to make space for Jamie at the opposite side of the tub. 

Jamie felt like a blackmailer. Abashed, he bit his lip in his usual bemused fashion. “Are you sure? I mean, I know it’s been my idea all along, but I didn’t realize, I didn’t know, I…” He stammered miserably, let out a resigned sigh, and then he decisively got to the point. “I mean, won’t you be upset if I do this?”

Brandon casually nodded his head. “The water is nice, it’ll keep you warm.” Classic. A part of Jamie screamed ‘That’s not the friggin’ point!’, while another was endeared and oddly calm – with Brandon acting like that, so perfectly oblivious, appearing so ignorant of the obvious implications of Jamie getting into that bath with him, Jamie felt like he could rest assured that Brandon was on his way to recovery from the trauma of the past few days.

So he decided not to argue. Not that arguing would solve anything, with Brandon being the ultimate champion of inconvenient topic evasion. Instead, Jamie decided to imagine they had agreed on an unspoken, implicit level, and he simply gave Brandon a serious look straight in the eye.

“Alright, but if anything feels wrong to you… just tell me immediately, okay? Promise you’ll tell me”, he asked, tentatively placing his hands by the collar of his shirt.

Brandon compliantly nodded his head, with that adorable air of innocence that won Jamie over time and again. “Okay, I will”, he confirmed, relaxing in the water as he waited for Jamie to join him.

Button by button Jamie undid his shirt, careful not to let his wavering fingers make the process overly long and ceremonious. His mind was spinning. There he was about to finally get what he wanted. It would be the first time since they had slept with each other – in reality it had been a little more than two months before, but to Jamie it quite felt like another lifetime – that their naked bodies would be so close together. To Jamie, the prospect was thrilling and nearly unbearable. 

He was excited and anxious at the same time. It was an honor and a beautiful thing to do, to be allowed so close to Brandon, a privilege to share that bare space and to trust him with what was normally hidden before the people’s curious eyes: the imperfection and the truth. But then, imperfection was precisely something difficult to trust. What if Jamie failed? What if he let Brandon down? He was just a man, after all. He didn’t have an impeccable command of his own body. What if being so intimate with Brandon he couldn’t control and hide his arousal? That would be so unfair to Brandon. It would certainly frighten him and betray his precious trust. Now that finally things had turned at least remotely steady, was it really worth it risking it all so fast? 

As he put away his shirt and began unzipping his trousers, Jamie’s gaze met Brandon’s – and to Jamie’s amazement, all of his second thoughts suddenly disappeared. Brandon’s eyes were so serene, his expression so carefree. He was simply waiting for a friend to join him in something cozy and fun, and that was about that, nothing more to it. Jamie couldn’t help a smile, and Brandon smiled back at him, trustful and unguarded. 

Jamie wanted to protect him with all his power. He wanted to keep that smile forever. As simple as that.

Suddenly he was sure it would be alright. There was no way in the world he would regard this wounded, vulnerable man as a sexual object. He might not be able to vouch for his body’s organic reactions from now on, but he knew he would make it alright nonetheless. There was a certain purity about the two of them right now, and a certain purity about this bath. Even with all its physicality and sensuality, there was simply no room for sexualization there in that tub. 

And while it may have sounded like a contradiction, it all made perfect sense to Jamie the way he saw it, the way he experienced it right then and there.

He did feel a tiny sting of embarrassment at showing his nudity to Brandon, but even that had an innocent flavor of a children’s play to it rather than racy tactics between two adults. Trying not to overly flash his groin area, he entered the water and, facing Brandon from the opposite side of the tub, he surrendered to the relaxing, fluent warmth, taking a dip down to his neck. 

He paid attention not to lean too close to Brandon. He was careful even not to slip against the tube surface with any part of his body. He did, however, experimentally brush Brandon’s ankles with his feet. 

Instead of pulling away, Brandon brushed Jamie’s feet back. “See? I told you it would be nice”, he reminded with a smile, resting his chin upon his tightly joined knees. Jamie could tell Brandon was trying to avoid exposing himself to Jamie, but it revealed no traces of fear – it simply looked like caution. 

Jamie inhaled profoundly and gave in to that special mood. There was something so unbelievable about what they were doing right now. It was so natural, with no pretense, virtually childlike. Their exposed bodies were the truth, and the truth was quietly bold – and so innocent it nearly moved Jamie to tears.

“You were right”, Jamie whispered, a sense of awe ringing in his voice. He took a deep breath and let the steamy air fill his whole being with that wide-eyed honesty of the moment. Secure in his belief it would be a fair gesture to do, he extended his arm to gently stroke Brandon’s hair and cheek. Not surprisingly, Brandon’s hair was greasy and sticky after these three adventurous days, and his skin felt rough with unkempt stubble against the droplets oozing from Jamie’s palm. “You could use a shave. And a hair-wash, too”, he observed.

Unwinding in spite of – or maybe thanks to? – Jamie’s touch, Brandon agreed: “U-huh, I could”. He paused as if to boost the impression before he added his familiar, it-explains-everything line: “I’m dirty”.

A bit exasperated at Brandon getting back to that topic which Jamie hoped for now had been forgotten, Jamie resolutely shook his head. “No, you’re not.” Pouring some shampoo onto his hands, he emphasized: “It’s just that you’ve got yourself dirty, but it’s not the same as being dirty. Can’t you tell the difference?”

Brandon didn’t reply, which in fact may have been interpreted as any possible answer. Jamie knew better than to pull on that thread. It wasn’t the most urgent matter to solve at that very moment, and the magic of their bath together was at stake in case one word too much or too smothering was uttered. 

Instead, he beckoned Brandon over. Brandon moved himself to Jamie rather voluntarily, even though he still kept his knees together and his torso was bent forward as if he was wary of exposing too much. His stare, however, was secure and unafraid. Jamie knew without any doubt that Brandon felt safe with him right now and that he was willing to confide his body to him in as private an act as washing.

Jamie shifted his body weight to his knees and angled forward to reach Brandon’s head. Just to stay on the safe side, he watched out not to rise above the water with his lower body. 

He smoothly ran his fingers through Brandon’s hair and started to caress the skin on his head with a gentle massage.

He could feel his fingers glow with all the affection he had for Brandon. Touching his head, his face, his increasingly silky hair, Jamie was breathless with the notion that all the while he was making a connection with an existence precious beyond any words: his irreplaceable, his dearest, his love. 

He had had no clue that an action as simple as washing someone’s hair could so easily become a nearly sacred ritual of care and devotion. 

And he really gave it his all as he rhythmically rubbed the shampoo into Brandon’s hair, admiring their now uncovered, beautiful tawny shade; as he pressed his fingertips against the notoriously tense muscles of Brandon’s head and neck; as he stroked with his thumbs Brandon’s strong jawline, scratching against the short, tickly facial hair. “It’s alright, see?”, he convinced Brandon with a smile, which became wider and wider as Brandon was visibly loosening up to Jamie’s touch with every passing second. “I’m so glad you came back, I can’t even tell you how much.”

All this time Brandon remained calm and motionless. And thus, he took Jamie by surprise when after Jamie had rinsed his hair, he suddenly moved closer to him, brushing Jamie’s chest with his knees. 

Jamie’s body certainly overreacted to that contact: his spine underwent a strong shiver, and his cheeks immediately burnt. The peacefulness of the whole setting helped Jamie not to panic, but still it was a powerful reminder of how much Jamie’s skin yearned for Brandon after these two months. 

And even that intense reaction on the inside wasn’t enough to prepare Jamie to what he was about to hear Brandon whisper sensually, face to face.

“Would you like to do it? Because I would… I’d like to feel you inside me.”

Perhaps that talk they had just had about Brandon’s fantasies with Jamie on top should have set Jamie up for what was coming up. But admitting to the fantasies was one thing, and an explicit invitation was another. It was all so surreal, so… crazy, and the consequent dizzy spell almost dragged Jamie under the surface.

Somehow he managed to maintain the control and composure, biting his lower lip so hard as if his whole touch with reality depended upon it. Overcoming all the shyness, inhibitions, and the emotional storm raging in his veins, Jamie drew his lips to Brandon’s ear, and he muttered almost inaudibly, but resolutely: “Yes, I’d like that. … A lot”. 

Things took then an even more startling turn. Upon hearing Jamie’s consent, Brandon parted his knees and spread his legs, placing Jamie between his thighs. He rested his back comfortably against the tub surface and nodded his head invitingly, with an enticing look on his face.

Normally, merely seeing such a sight would have been an ultimate turn-on for Jamie. But right now, confusion prevented him from experiencing any kind of physical excitement. He felt like shouting with disbelief: ‘What… what do you mean, right now?!’, but he was too stunned to even speak. 

It would never have occurred to him that what Brandon was asking him about was in fact ‘do you want to do it _here_ and _now_ ’, and not ‘do you want to do it _ever_ ’.

What was that about again? Was that a test? Or a trap? Because it can’t have been possible for Brandon to wish to go all the way with Jamie when he was still healing physical and emotional wounds from a harsh group intercourse his addiction had prompted him to participate in, right? 

Or could it?

What was it that Brandon really wanted?

Jamie took a close look at Brandon’s face, in a search for hints if Brandon was really being serious about that offer, and whatever on earth had made him make that offer in the first place. Despite his seductive pose, Brandon showed no actual arousal. He was simply sitting there, waiting for the things to happen – things that would make him feel at last. And those would be some truly horrible things, such as pain, humiliation, and flashbacks of the recent violation upon his body. Was Brandon so desperate about feeling anything that he was willing to pay a price this huge? Jamie could hardly control a wince when seeing Brandon like that reminded him of their first and only night together, and how compulsive, how erratic Brandon was about achieving satisfaction, to the point of inflicting exhaustion and pain upon both himself and his lover. 

So yes, Brandon may have wanted it, after all – and that was not to say that what he wanted was any good for him. 

A terrifying hunch crept up beneath Jamie’s skin, an uneasy suspicion bordering on certainty regarding the question what it was in Brandon’s past that had made him the way he was today. It was not like the idea hadn’t ever occurred to Jamie before, while he had been leafing through those tones of books on sex addiction, and specifically the chapters on the conditioning which often caused such a disposition. But now it was different. 

Now it was more than a mere idea, now that Jamie was looking at that frightened little child inside the frail, injured body of a grown man, that child who could think of no other way of being close with someone than to surrender his body in an abusive sex act. 

It was all too real, and all the pieces suddenly seemed to fit. The chill inside Jamie’s blood spreading all over his body told him he was right. The emotion was so strong it could make Jamie lose his mind if he hadn’t smothered it for now. 

Again, it wasn’t about Jamie’s emotions. For now he had to take care of that child he was looking at. He needed to let him know that as long as he was with Jamie, nobody would ever hurt him like that anymore, neither Jamie nor anyone else. With Jamie, he was safe and appreciated, and loved. There were no conditions, just love and admiration. He deserved both, he deserved it more than anyone. 

“No, Brandon, not today”, Jamie shook his head decisively, an influx of a new energy filling him up to face this new challenge. “We have to wait until everything heals. I don’t want to cause you any pain, alright?” Not discouraged by the sharp look of disappointment flashing through Brandon’s face, he cuddled with his damp curls into Brandon’s neck to reassure him that he still wanted him and cherished his closeness – that his refusal had nothing to do with Brandon being ‘too dirty’ to have sex with, or whatever. “Can I just touch you for now?”

Brandon shrugged uncomfortably. “But I want it! And I’ll be fine.” It was a rare case of Brandon showing any emotions through his voice. Irritation with a bit of temper, to be precise. The impression of a child seemed all the more valid now, an impatient, sulky child who was trying to disguise his fear of abandonment as a frown. 

Thinking about Brandon in such a way, as a child who demanded care and attention but misidentified the expression of both, was something that Jamie found right now truly helpful. It allowed him to take charge of his own confusion and not let his own physical and emotional needs interfere with all the significant things that had to be said and done immediately.

He gave Brandon an earnest look deep into his eyes, and he soothingly stroked his cheek. “Listen to me, beautiful. I gave you my word I would show you how to love and appreciate your body. I can’t begin with causing you pain, can I?” He smoothly moved his arms forward to wrap them around Brandon’s shoulders, relishing the proximity of the two of them. The raw scent of Brandon’s skin pleasurably hit his nostrils. “Can you trust me? Can you leave it to me? Because if you’re going to let me in, it will mean you must have trusted me. When two people are this close, they could hurt each other in every conceivable way. That’s why they can’t do without trust. I need you to believe that whatever I decide, I’m doing it for your own good. And I know you do. You wouldn’t ask me to do something like that if you didn’t trust me, I know that.”

He finished his explanation with a soft hug, paying attention for their hips not to even graze each other, so that his behavior wouldn’t contradict his words. If he had sounded calm and in control, then that was absolutely in accordance with his intention – and he was sincerely thankful if it didn’t show how he was buzzing on the inside with the nervousness of it all.

All the while, Brandon was observing Jamie attentively, possibly scrutinizing if Jamie wasn’t trying to sell him a bunch of nicely wrapped lies – essentially, if what Jamie was saying made any sense to him. Apparently, Jamie passed that test, because after a few seconds of considering, Brandon slowly nodded his head in agreement.

It was a huge relief for Jamie. He had invested all his confidence into that clarification why having sex right now was a bad idea and why they should wait. And proportionally to that confidence, now he had grown equally insecure about Brandon’s response. He wasn’t sure if his little talk had really touched him, if it really had pulled the right chords. And so having Brandon react like that made Jamie grin like the Cheshire Cat. Positively beaming, he put his arms around Brandon’s neck and leant over to kiss him on that broad, manly forehead.

“I love you so much”, he blurted out a hastened confession, an extremely untimely one, as he himself was quick to realize. 

His heart began to throb anxiously while a panicked look raced through Brandon’s face. This definitely was not the appropriate news to break to Brandon: for one evening it was a tiny bit too much. 

Before Brandon’s allergic reaction to the forbidden _l-word_ could prompt him to escape, Jamie grabbed him by the hand and planted a soft kiss at the base of his fingers. “It’s okay, you don’t have to say anything”, he hushed Brandon into believing that this whole _l-word_ thing, and him being unable to say it back at the moment, was really no big deal. “You don’t have to go looking for the names for the things that you are feeling inside. All that matters is that we both know that it’s all there, right there inside you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here now.” 

Upon hearing Jamie’s words, Brandon grew relaxed again. The reassurance that he didn’t have to say he loved Jamie back, or really to reply to Jamie’s confession in any way, must have set him at ease. He didn’t embrace Jamie himself, but he did look comfortable with Jamie holding him like that, their calm breaths ebbing and flowing evenly in the steamy bathroom space. 

“You’re so brave, Brandon. Thank you for that”, Jamie whispered, cuddling Brandon until they both were perfectly easy and tranquil again. 

And he meant what he had said. After all Brandon had been through – during those days as well all his life, all these things that Jamie had barely any idea about, but the devastating results of which he could witness on a day to day basis – it was just to Jamie’s sheer amazement that Brandon could still hold on so well. And more than that: Brandon was still capable of trusting another human being, of placing his well-being, his faith, his future in their hands. How strong did you have to be just to do that? How much Jamie could learn from that?

It was now self-evident that Brandon’s life had been a nightmare. Whatever it had exactly been – and for now Jamie was frankly thankful that he was yet to know those ghastly details – it must have taken quite some backbone and unthinkable levels of willpower, durability and focus to get through it. And Brandon had it all. All his life, he probably couldn’t rely on anyone else to see him through, or he had learnt better than to depend on anyone. Isolated and torn up, he had still made it. He had genuinely been made tough.

He was a survivor. 

And now all that Jamie wanted was for Brandon to know he wasn’t alone anymore. The times of his lonely drifting on the rough seas after the shipwreck were now over. He had finally floated ashore and now he had someone to take care of him, someone to keep him warm and sheltered. Someone truly impressed by Brandon’s power to carry on and make it through the darkest of times.

Brandon would call himself dirty, like it was some inherent quality of him as a human being; but Jamie knew it was just some mud and seaweed that had naturally clung onto him through those phases of his solitary buoyancy. True, it would take a certain amount of cleansing and scratching to get rid of that dirt shell – but that shimmering pearl underneath was worth every second of every effort.

Jamie took a sponge and proceeded to bathe Brandon, using the shower gel sparingly so as not to irritate bruises and abrasions so profuse below Brandon’s waistline. He had inquired first if Brandon would be bothered by Jamie washing or touching any part of his body. Brandon said that everything would do, and so Jamie moved even closer to him, settling himself between Brandon’s thighs and resting his back against Brandon’s knee. He didn’t mind anymore if their bodies brushed each other, private parts included; it was all unintentional, straightforward and not stimulating at all. 

More importantly, Brandon remained undisturbed by any of it, too. He released his muscles and allowed Jamie to reach every area of his body. He stayed peaceful and quiet, and visibly enjoyed the massaging sensation of the sponge removing the days-old layer of sweat and grim off of his arms, torso and legs. 

Jamie meant for his touch to be extra gentle, rinsing Brandon’s lower abdomen, sore thighs and buttocks without using the sponge, only by faint grazing of his bare fingers. At those spots he was especially careful to make his touch feel anything but titillating – and judging from Brandon’s steady, even breathing, and a laid back expression on his face, apparently Jamie had succeeded. The point was just like Jamie had promised before: to appreciate and respect Brandon’s wonderful body.

All the while Jamie didn’t utter a word anymore, not wanting for the rowdiness of the spoken word to smash this crystal-layered wrap of the moment. Time and again he would look up and smile at Brandon, devotion gleaming in his eyes. 

When he was done washing Brandon, he placed himself comfortably in Brandon’s embrace, rinsed the sponge and handed it to Brandon, with a half-questioning, half-pleading look in his eyes. Brandon accepted the sponge with a nod and began to return the favor. 

Mediated by the sponge, Brandon’s touch on Jamie’s body felt delightfully soft and mellow. Resting his back lightly upon Brandon’s chest, Jamie succumbed completely to that precious feeling of being taken care of, and the consequent notion that his body was something of value, something gorgeous. 

He reposed his head on Brandon’s shoulders, and his chocolate brown locks thus stuck to Brandon’s refreshed, slippery skin. He remained motionless most of the time, present to every second, leisurely savoring every sensation as it came. Only rarely would he make a minor shift in his position to let Brandon approach a new body part more easily. He would sometimes let out a small, lazy sigh as Brandon’s sponge-armed hand tickled or stroked a tender spot on his body. 

The water, now significantly cooler than when they had entered the bath, was reaching up to Jamie’s neck, covering their chests and most of their arms. The drop in the temperature of water was completely compensated by Brandon’s body warmth, which wrapped around Jamie in a sublime cocoon. 

Jamie closed his eyes, focusing on the feel of Brandon’s regular breathing on the back of his neck. The warm air flowed back and forth, rustling in Jamie’s hair, and it matched the rhythm of the water crawling up and down Jamie’s upper body as carried by Brandon’s movements. This perfect harmony of both these tides reminded Jamie of the seaside. He felt like he was standing on the shore, the waves hitting against his feet and then receding towards the horizon. 

Ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows… The waves would come and go. Some of them were mild and friendly, others were fierce and hostile. And he stood there against them all, hand in hand with Brandon. He would help Brandon up whenever one of the waves swept him off of his feet, never letting go of the tight grip on his hand. And Brandon would do the same for him. 

That was how everything would work from now on, or at least what Jamie wished for with all his might.

Now Jamie was a survivor too.

He still had so much to learn from Brandon about the indispensable survival skills, all about staying strong in the face of a raging storm. And of course, on his part, he had to teach Brandon all that he knew himself about that matter. They would learn together, teach together, and survive together. 

What better prospect for the future than that? 

Behind his closed eyelids Jamie could still see today’s streets flooding with the rain. He could still hear the raindrops drum against the pavement. And a motionless Brandon in the middle of it all, letting the cold droplets caress his body like they were the only thing he could possibly allow so close to him. A lonely Brandon patiently waiting on Jamie – waiting for Jamie to step into the rain and shield them both with an umbrella.

There was something special about that rain. A certain calm in the eye of a storm.

Jamie realized that to walk Brandon through that downpour, to walk him through the pain, he would necessarily have to face his own pain. To challenge it, and then to disarm it. It was that lifelong pain that had always held Jamie back from being who he was meant to be, but which Jamie had always chosen to disregard and leave alone, all out of fear and false hopes there would be somebody else, a mister perfect, to come and save him from himself instead.

But Jamie was a big boy now, and he had already learned there were no mister perfects in this world. There was, however, a Brandon who needed him. And it was for his sake that confronting the pain, fighting against his own old shadows, and ultimately growing by giving up the fear and self-indulgence made brilliant sense.

He inhaled deeply, taking in Brandon’s raw, earthy scent. He clasped his hand with Brandon’s, and their fingers entwined tightly.

In that single moment, he experienced perfect togetherness. It was worth every moment that had led them here. And it would be worth any future price to pay, too.

If it was a reason that Jamie needed to move on, none could be more compelling than that. 

_It’s time to place your bets in life_  
I’ve played the losers game of life  
Dream about the sun, you prince of rain 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this is it. Thank you for joining Brandon and Jamie on this long, exhausting and sometimes mushy ride, for rooting for them and feeling for them. Also, thank you for every single kudos and comment, and for being so receptive to this story, even though it is centered around an OC, has a difficult subject matter and is not always very fun to read.
> 
> While this is the end of _Prince of rain_ , I might write some one-shots in the future about how Jamie and Brandon's life together turned out. Stay tuned for those. Also, don't forget to check out our ask blog for Jamie and Brandon. You can send our boys your questions, comments and wishes (if you have any). Our boys will be happy to reply to all of them.  
> http://noshametoask.tumblr.com/ 
> 
> There's also a piece of important information I wanted to share with you here. It's about my role-play partner, who has authored this wonderful and amazingly realistic Brandon (you all loved him, didn't you?). In many respects, he's a lot like Brandon, that's why he understands him so well. Currently he's struggling to recover from his own shit. All his life he's been going it alone, just like Brandon, and like Brandon he's been brave enough to make it this far. Now he, too, is trying to break through his isolation and learn to love himself, but he still has a long way to go. Please send him your mental hugs and support, and wish him luck as you would for Brandon.


End file.
